Catchpoint's Tracing Smartboard is designed to help you quickly identify the cause of performance issues in your Systems and Services. When you receive an alert or see concerning test results in your dashboards, a good first troubleshooting step is to view the Smartboard, locate the issue in the timeline, and then use the filters and visualization tools to see if you can narrow down the potential causes of the issue.
Let's look closer at each of the sections in the Tracing Smartboard.
Source
This is the specific System or Service whose data is being rendered in the Smartboard. You can change the source by clicking on the "Source" button in the upper left, then selecting the desired data source. When you make a selection, the Smartboard refreshes all sections with data from the new source.
Timeline
The Tracing Smartboard begin withs an interactive timeline. This timeline plots a line graph representing Response Time (ms), and uses red bars to represent the number of errors occuring The timeline helps you spot trends in test performance.
All graphs and tables displayed in the Smartboard are generated using test data from within your selected time window. You can change this time window by clicking and dragging either edge of the shaded area, or by making a selection in the date/time fields at the upper left and clicking Go.
When you make a new selection, the Smartboard refreshes with data from the new time window.
At the upper right, you can select the Statistical calculation of the Response Time metric - Median, Average, 75th percentile, or 95th percential, and you can also select to display the number of Requests on the graph.
Filters
To Filter the data displayed, simply click into the "Add Filters" field and type in the name of the filtering option you want.
Alternatively, you can access filtering options by clicking the "Filters" button below the timeline, which opens the Filters blade:
You can Filter by the Endpoint that requests are directed to, ErrorType, and Method, and for each filter, you can choose whether to Include or Exclude the selected items. You can see what filters you have applied by clicking Selected.
Key Metrics
A series of tiles displaying essential information about performance during the selected timeframe.
Overview Tab
A series of charts with detailed performance metrics, including Transaction Count, Error Type Count, and
Endpoints Tab
A table of all endpoints that requests were made to, with details including the method used, median response time, # Requests, and # Errors.
Transactions Tab
A table with details of every transaction that occurred during the selected timeframe.
Errors List
A list of errors that occurred during the selected timeframe, grouped by type. You can click an error type to see details.
