Monitoring Web Activity
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You might have to whitelist our chromium extensions for them to work. This can be done by the registry key: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Google\Chrome\ExtensionInstallWhitelist.
You might also need to whitelist NativeMessaging for the extensions:
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When you've defined your applications, you can easily view how they perform in several different widgets that take Application as an input.
You can monitor a web application as a standard application using the ordinary IP response time measurement. However, if you want to log the response time per URL requested from a web server, your PerformanceGuard administrator must set up Web Applications.
A transaction filter is a mechanism for collecting data about web requests and for extracting information from those requests so that you can monitor the performance of websites and web applications.
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Set Up Web Application
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You can only do this if you're a PerformanceGuard administrator. |
- Select Administration > Network Application and click the Create Web Application button.
Select required Type of transaction filter:
HTTP monitors directly on data packets collected on the monitored network interface (NIC) rather than in the browser. Response times for this type of transaction filter may thus often be slightly lower than for the IE type.
Note icon false The HTTP type of transaction filter is applied to requests sent to the specified host and port, but not to responses. As filtration is applied at the network layer, you can only apply HTTP transaction filters to clear-text requests. This means that you can't use this type of transaction filter to monitor requests made using SSL, other types of encryption, https, http/2, spdy/3, or web sockets. IE is aimed at Internet Explorer. It monitors web requests as they are experienced in that browser. An IE transaction filter uses specific features in Internet Explorer, and therefore it doesn't work with other browsers, such as Chrome, Edge, or Firefox.
Note icon false For IE transaction filters to work, your agent configuration must support the collection of Internet Explorer data. To verify this, select ADMINISTRATION > Agent Configuration > Configurations, click the Edit-link next to the required agent configuration group, scroll down to the Network Report section and verify that Enable IE Reports is selected. Chromium is aimed at Cromium Chromium-based web browsers such as the Chrome Web Browser. It monitors web requests as they are experienced in that browser.
Note icon false For Chromium transaction filters to work, your agent configuration must support the collection of Chrome data. To verify this, select ADMINISTRATION > Agent Configuration > Configurations, click the Edit-link next to the required agent configuration group, scroll down to the Network Report section and verify that Enable Chromium Reports is selected.
3. Specify a Name for the transaction filter. The name is used to identify the transaction filter when you view transaction data in the PerformanceGuard web interface, and the name must therefore be unique.
4. Type a short Description of the transaction filter
5. Specify the transaction filter's Configuration. You can read more about how to make a transaction filter configuration in the following sections.
6. When ready, click the Save Filter button. You are now ready to apply your transaction filter to agent configurations.
How Is a Transaction Filter Configuration Structured, and How Does it Work?
A transaction filter configuration consists of a host part and a tag part:
- The host part identifies what host (server and, if required, port) to consider when filtering requests. A transaction filter configuration must contain only one host specification.
- The tag part contains a tag identifier and a regular expression that's used to perform the actual filtering. A transaction filter configuration can contain one or more tags. Each tag must contain an ID and one to three regular expressions.
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Example: A simple filter that'll generate tags like URL:page.htm for each URL visited on http://www.w3.org: |
Property | Description | Examples |
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Host | Packets to and from the specified host and port will be routed to the transaction filter. |
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| InitialTimeout | This is only for Chromium. InitialTimeout is the maximum time (in milliseconds) the filter will wait between requests, but only for the first time, the web page is loaded. The performance of the site is measured when this time has past passed and there is are no more requests. |
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| Timeout | This is only for Chromium. Timout is the same as InitialTimeout , but used after the first loading of the webpage. This is used when browsing on a SPA (single page application) like PerformanceGuard. |
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Tag Specification | ||
Id | Defines a name prefix for the tag. Like the name of the transaction filter itself, the name that you can specify after the = part of the Tag.Id will be selectable as a transaction tag when you later view transaction data in the PerformanceGuard web interface. |
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RegExp | This is the actual regular expression string that's used to check if a particular request is relevant for the transaction filter. It's also used to extract any variable part of the tag.
Chromium
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The regular expressions match the specified data source , and may extract parts of the matched expressions. The extracted parts are then concatenated with the Tag Id to form the tag.
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Examples: |
The regular expression source defines which part of the request should be used when matching the regular expression. The regular expression thus defines two things:
- The criteria for a match
- Which part of the regular expression source should be extracted
The part that should be extracted are enclosed in {curly brackets} for IE/HTTP and (parentheses) for Chromium
(This part only works with HTTP and IE).
Regular Expression Source | Description | |||||
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URL | The regular expression is run on the HTTP URI, excluding any parameters. | |||||
Method | The expression source is the HTTP method, which is always either GET or POST. | |||||
<Parameter> | If the specified name is recognized as the name of a supplied HTTP parameter—either supplied as part of the URL (using '?') for a GET request or supplied as the body of a POST request—the value is extracted.
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When a request fulfills the regular expressions in a transaction filter, a transaction name is constructed by concatenating the tag identifier (for example Tag1.Id) with the information extracted by the regular expressions.
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Example: Tag 1 Id = URI: |
If we look at the example, the first regular expression, Tag1.RegExp1, will extract the value of the HTTP method meta tag, that is GET or POST. The second regular expression, Tag1.RegExp2, will extract the entire URL of the request. The tag identifier and the extracted parts are then concatenated, and that generates the transaction name:
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Examples: URI:GET/images/logo.png |
Regular Expression Syntax for Transaction Filter Configurations
. | Match any single character. | ||||||||||
[ ] | Defines a character class. Matches any character inside the brackets.
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^ | If this meta character occurs at the start of a character class, it negates the character class. A negated character class matches any character except those inside the brackets.
If ^ is at the beginning of the regular expression, it matches the beginning of the input.
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- | Indicates a range of characters in a character class.
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? | Indicates that the preceding expression is optional. It matches once or not at all.
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+ | Indicates that the preceding expression matches one or more times.
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* | Indicates that the preceding expression matches zero or more times. | ||||||||||
??, +?, *? | Non-greedy versions of ?, +, and *. These match as little as possible, unlike the greedy versions that match as much as possible.
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( ) | Grouping operator.
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{ } | Indicates a match group. | ||||||||||
\ | Escape character: interpret the next character literally.
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$ | At the end of a regular expression, this character matches the end of the input.
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| | Alternation operator. Separates two expressions, exactly one of which matches.
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! | Negation operator. The expression following ! doesn't match the input.
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\a | Any aplhanumeric character. Shortcut for ([a-zA-Z0-9]) | ||||||||||
\b | White space (blank). Shortcut for ([ \t]). | ||||||||||
\c | Any alphabetic character. Shortcut for ([a-zA-Z]). | ||||||||||
\d | Any decimal digit. Shortcut for ([0-9]). | ||||||||||
\h | Any hexadecimal digit. Shortcut for ([0-9a-fA-F]). | ||||||||||
\n | Newline. Shortcut for (\r|(\r?\n)). | ||||||||||
\q | A quoted string. Shortcut for (\"[^\"]*\")|(\'[^\']*\'). | ||||||||||
\w | A simple word. Shortcut for ([a-zA-Z]+). | ||||||||||
\z | An unsigned integer. Shortcut for ([0-9]+). |
Apply Transaction Filter to Agent Configuration
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When you have created and saved a transaction filter, you can apply it to agent configurations. You do this by editing required agent configuration groups :
- Select ADMINISTRATION > Agent Configuration > Configurations.
- Click the Edit link next to the required agent configuration group.
- On the Agent configuration tab, scroll down until you see the Network Report section.
- Enable IE Reports and Enable Chrome Reports
- Click the Save Configuration button.
How Do Agents Handle Transaction Filters?
When the PerformanceGuard agent examines a web request to determine if the request is relevant for a transaction filter, the agent will go through the tags in the transaction filter one by one:
- For each tag the agent tests if the regular expressions match.
- If all regular expressions match the criteria, the agent constructs a tag ID and assigns that tag ID to the connection.
- If a regular expression for a tag doesn't match, the agent considers the next tag in the transaction filter until it finds a match or there are no more tags left to examine.
View Transaction Data
To view transaction data in the PerformanceGuard web interface, select:
- ANALYZE > Graphs > Time View > Transactions to view transaction response times, availability, etc. in a graph
- ANALYZE > Graphs > Trend View > Transactions to view periodical trends in transaction response times, availability, etc.
- ANALYZE > Graphs > Combined Bar Charts > Compare Transactions to compare transactions
- Add Application Chart or Application Sunburst Widget to your dashboard
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Do Your Transaction Filters Not Work?
See the troubleshooting topic Transaction Filters Don't Work.
Does Your Chrome Extension Get Stuck On Loading?
See the troubleshooting topic Chrome Extension is stuck on loading.
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