Transactions page: Find specific performance problems

APM's Transactions page helps you identify transactions that may be good candidates for fine-tuning performance problems or resolving errors. This page lists the selected app's transaction Requests, the top twenty transactions by percent of wall-clock time, and relevant throughputs (requests per minute or rpm).

For non-web transactions (such as message processing, background tasks, and other processes and jobs that do not handle web requests), this page shows charts of CPU and memory usage.

Types of transactions

Depending on your selected application, the Transactions page may include a dropdown you can use to select from the types of transactions available. New Relic measures processing time by type of request (web transaction or non-web transaction). This may include:

• Web: App server requests
• Non-web: Other requests (operations, background tasks, etc.)

The Transactions page also may include links to transaction traces and key transactions. The types of information available will depend on your selected app and the type of request (web or non-web).

Wall-clock time

Wall-clock time measures "real-time elapsed" during a specific transaction. For example, let's say you're an engineer responsible for managing the checkout experience on an ecommerce site. You'd like to understand how long it takes for a customer to add an item to their cart. The transaction took 15 seconds to complete but one minute in the real world or on the "wall clock" for the customer. This discrepancy in time could be because the function had to wait for network calls or other inputs and outputs, and that waiting time isn't considered in the system's transaction time. New Relic uses wall-clock time for all the transactions and then sums that value across all of the transactions.

In the above example, imagine that when a customer adds an item to their cart, the host has to make two requests to complete this work. One of these functions might take 3 seconds to complete, and the other takes 2 seconds, but because they occur simultaneously, the customer only had to wait 3 seconds. Because of this parallel work, you may see percentages over 100. For example, 100% would indicate that the execution time across all selected transactions equals the time expended when recording wall-clock time.

View transactions

To view information about your app's transaction requests:

1. Do one of the following:
   • Go to one.newrelic.com > All capabilities > APM & services > (select an app) > Monitor > Transactions.
   • Go to one.newrelic.com > All capabilities > APM & Services > (select an app) > Monitor > Transactions.
2. If applicable: To change which available types of transactions appear, select the Type.
3. Select the sort order, or keep the default.
4. Select the type of view as a chart (default), histogram, or percentile, if available.
5. To view additional details, use any of the transaction drill-down functions.
6. To add a chart to a dashboard, mouse over the chart, then select the Add to a dashboard link that appears below it.

If a chart's background is light red, this indicates a time period when an alert condition's Critical threshold has been breached. To view the incident details in alerts, click the chart.

For more information, see the documentation about managing your dashboard.

Use drill-down functions

Use any of New Relic's standard user interface functions to drill down into detailed information. The Transactions page has additional drill-down functions.

Change the displayed transaction Type

If the Type dropdown appears above list of transactions, you can select your choice of transaction type. The available types depend on what transactions your application uses.

Select the type of performance measurement (Sort)

The Sort dropdown above the transaction list allows you to review transactions according to different measurements. This helps you identify good candidates for performance tuning or fixing errors.

You can sort by:

Sort option	Comments
Most time consuming (default)	Highest percentage of the app's total time used. This measures which transactions consumed the most time in total. This is calculated by multiplying the number of times the transaction is called by the time the transaction took to complete. A transaction could be short, but if it is frequently called, it would appear at the top of this ranking.
Slowest average response time	Slowest individual transactions for the time period as averaged. This measures the slowest types of transaction. A transaction could be called only a few times, but if it is one of the longest transactions to finish, it would appear at the top of this ranking.
Apdex most dissatisfying	Transactions with the highest percentages of user dissatisfaction levels for the response time of your web apps and services (Apdex). The dissatisfaction level is the difference between a perfect Apdex score (1.0) and your app's apdex_t ("tolerating") score, based on your Apdex settings. Transactions that have the highest (worst) percentages appear at the top of this ranking.
Highest throughput	This measures the amount of throughput, in operation requests per minute or rpm. (For web throughput, requests per minute is sometimes called pages per minute or ppm.) Transactions that have the highest number of requests per minute appear at the top of this ranking.

Tip

Depending on the transaction type you choose, different sort options may be available.

Mouse over summary information about a transaction

To quickly view key pieces of information about the transaction, mouse over its name on the list.

Select detailed information about a transaction

To view detailed information, select a transaction from the list, then select App performance or Historical performance. You can also view transaction traces.

View transaction data in different visual formats

The Transaction page's Top 20 transactions chart and a selected transaction's App performance window include options to view data as a:

• Chart

• Histogram

• Percentile

  In addition, from the Breakdown table for a selected transaction, you can select the link to show or hide all segments of the breakdown data.

Show corresponding browser request data

In order to view browser information, you must install the browser agent. Then, to view corresponding browser request data, use either of these options:

• Select the Browser drill-down link if available.
• Go to one.newrelic.com > All capabilities > Browser > (select an app) > Page views.

Identify transaction segments with high call counts or time

In a transaction's Breakdown table, the Avg calls (per txn) column may include colorized segment values. These indicate instrumented segments that have exceeded thresholds.

• Yellow: Segment time is more than 10% of total transaction time and call count is higher than 10.
• Red: Segment time is more than 10% of total transaction time and call count is higher than 20.

Additional functions

Here are some additional functions for the Transactions page's selected transaction.