Automatic Timers and Slowdown Snapshots

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If you have been redirected to this page - please read the following:

The event you clicked on (either from the OverOps events explorer or by using the OverOps Reliability Dashboards) was not found. This can be due to one of the following reasons:

  • The "Automatic entry point timers” UDF is disabled or has not been set - in this case please check the UDF status in the “Performance Slowdowns” View Alert Setting.
  • The OverOps micro-agent flag for using the new timers feature has not been enabled; please add the flag as specified above.
  • You are using Java10/11 - Automatic Timers and Slowdown Snapshots are currently not supported on these Java versions (they will be available in the near future).

Introduction

OverOps has the capability to automatically detect slowdowns and identify possible root cause for each one of them. This is achieved thanks to an intelligent automatic timers mechanism that identifies the most significant method that could be causing a slowdown starting from the relevant entry point (the start of your transaction) and up to deeper method calls in order to provide a better understanding of what caused the slowdown.

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Note

Currently supported only on the JVM languages listed here.

How it Works

The OverOps micro-agent periodically collects statistics of each transaction, once our micro-agent encounters an entry point. The backend service collects this data, calculates the threshold for this entry point (based on a standard deviation calculation from the method’s average running time) and relay it back to the micro-agent.

When this timer feature is enabled, the micro-agent will take a snapshot of the slowdown event once the transaction running time is taking longer than the calculated threshold. The agent will do so while looking for the most significant methods using OverOps heuristics search algorithm, so we can get a deeper stack trace, with more relevant data for you to help you analyze where the most running time was spent.

For this ability to be achieved it is also required to apply a special new UDF called “Automatic entry point timers”.
If this feature has been enabled for your use - you will be able to see an admin view called “Performance Slowdowns” under the Admin category. The Timers UDF will be activated on this view as an Anomaly Alert and will automatically set the new timers on entry point exceeding their average threshold.
The parameters for this UDF can be set from the Alert Settings to control the following behaviours: the time period to use for the baseline, the number of standard deviations for the threshold, the minimum allowed threshold and the minimum delta value to a threshold that will cause an update of its value.

Also, in order to get the proper snapshot data of the transaction which has introduced the slowness, you need to enable the following runtime flag when you run the agent with your application:

-Dtakipi.parallax

java -Xmx2G -agentlib:TakipiAgent -Dtakipi.parallax -jar myapp.jar

Or you can set this parameter in the agent properties files:

takipi.parallax=1

Troubleshooting

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Java 10/11

Automatic Timers and Slowdown Snapshots are currently not enabled with Java 10/11 and you might get redirected to this page in error.
This feature will be available in the near future.

In case the event you clicked on (either from the OverOps Home or by using the OverOps Reliability Dashboards) was not found and you have received the “Event not found” message, this may be the result of one of the following causes:

  • The "Automatic entry point timers” UDF is disabled or has not been set - in this case please check the UDF status in the “Performance Slowdowns” View Alert Setting.
  • The OverOps micro-agent flag for using the new timers feature has not been enabled; please add the flag as specified above.

In case the issue persists and no timer events are being captured or found, please contact the OverOps support team.