Free Practice Questions for Cisco 500-420 Exam

A transaction snapshot in AppDynamics is a detailed report of a single execution of a business transaction. Its primary purpose is to analyze issues with a specific business transaction by providing a comprehensive view of the transaction's execution path, including timing, call graphs, and database queries. This allows performance analystsand developers to drill down into individual transactions to diagnose performance bottlenecks, errors, or anomalies.

References:

AppDynamics documentation on Transaction Snapshots: Offers detailed guidance on how to capture and analyze transaction snapshots to troubleshoot and optimize application performance.

When configuring Automatic Cleanup of stale Business Transactions, the "minutes since creation" option is often paired with the "Number of Calls" metric. This setting ensures that business transactions that have not been called within a certain timeframe and have had a negligible number of calls are automatically cleaned up, helping to maintain an organized and relevant set of business transactions in the monitoring system.

References:

AppDynamics documentation on Business Transactions: Discusses best practices for managing business transactions, including the automatic cleanup based on time and call volume thresholds.

For an e-commerce application built using a microservices architecture, logically grouping Transaction Detection rules can be effectively achieved through "Use Transaction Group." This approach allows for the organization of business transactions into meaningful groups that reflect the application's structure and the interactionsbetween its microservices. By grouping transactions, it becomes easier to monitor, analyze, and troubleshoot the application as a whole and its individual components, enhancing the visibility and management of the application's performance.

References:

AppDynamics documentation on Business Transactions: Provides insights on how to configure and manage business transactions, including grouping and monitoring strategies.

AppDynamics documentation on Microservices Monitoring: Offers guidance on best practices for monitoring applications designed with microservices architecture, including transaction grouping.

The performance pattern outside of business hours on 6/16/18 that would be of most interest to a Performance Analyst is the elevated response time, as indicated on 6/19/18. This is because it shows a significant spike in response time, which could indicate a performance issue that needs to be addressed. Anomalies in response time can often be more indicative of underlying problems than changes in call volume, especially when they occur outside of expected peak periods.

References:

AppDynamics documentation on Transaction Score: https://docs.appdynamics.com/latest/en/application-monitoring/application-dashboard/transaction-score

If a Performance Analyst has an urgent need to gather more data for an ongoing issue, they should enable Development Level Monitoring. This monitoring level increases the amount of detailed diagnostic data collected by the agent, such as snapshots and transaction traces, which can provide deeper insights into the issue at hand.

References:

AppDynamics documentation on Monitoring Levels: Describes the different levels of monitoring available, including Development Level Monitoring and the types of data each level collects.

When a Performance Analyst is faced with issues related to transaction response times on a specific node, focusing on the "Transaction performance" data is most relevant. This is because transaction performance metrics provide direct insights into the business transactions' speed, response times, and execution times, which are critical for identifying and troubleshooting performance issues. By selecting "Transaction performance" when creating a health rule, the analyst can monitor specific metrics such as average response time, slow transaction count, and very slow transaction count, which are directly related to the performance of business transactions on the node in question.

References:

AppDynamics documentation on Health Rules: This section explains how to create and configure health rules to monitor application performance metrics, including transaction performance.

AppDynamics documentation on Business Transactions: Provides details on how AppDynamics identifies and monitors business transactions, which are key to understanding application performance.

In Cisco AppDynamics, the transaction threshold configurations are typically found under the "Overview" tab. This is where you can view the health rule violations and performance baselines that are associated with transaction snapshots, which can include the configured transaction thresholds. These thresholds set the acceptable performance limits for transactions, and when these limits are exceeded, it may trigger health rule violations that are visible on the Overview tab.

References:

AppDynamics Documentation on Transaction Snapshots

AppDynamics Documentation on Health Rule Violations

In AppDynamics, metrics from different applications can indeed be cross-referenced on a single dashboard. This allows for a more holistic view of an organization's application ecosystem, facilitating the comparison and correlation of performance metrics across different applications within the same AppDynamics controller.

References:

AppDynamics documentation on Custom Dashboards: Details how to create custom dashboards that can include metrics from multiple applications, enabling cross-referencing and comprehensive performance monitoring.

Controller-level custom dashboards in AppDynamics have the flexibility to provide views that aggregate and compare data from different applications on the same Controller, as well as offer a customized view of applications, servers, and database performance data. This capability enables a holistic view of the IT environment, facilitating cross-application insights and the ability to correlate performance across different layers of the technology stack. Such dashboards are invaluable for understanding overarching trends, pinpointing systemic issues, and driving informed decision-making across multiple applications and infrastructure components.

References:

AppDynamics documentation on Custom Dashboards: Provides detailed instructions on creating and customizing dashboards at the Controller level, including the aggregation and comparison of data from various sources.

AppDynamics documentation on Controller UI: Explains the functionalities available within the Controller UI, including the creation of comprehensive dashboards that encompass application, server, and database metrics.