Visualization of End-To-End transactions is one of the key features of CA Continuous Application Insight. Transactions can span multiple services of an application. If a DevTest agent instruments a service it will report only its partial view of a transaction to the DevTest broker. The DevTest broker is able to assemble partial transactions from different agents into a single complete transaction. In DevTest, this assembling of partial transactions into a single one covering end-to-end information about a transaction is called Stitching.
DevTest broker stitches transactions by comparing Meta data from these partial transactions – such as IP addresses, Message IDs, classes – and linking them if they match. Sometimes, however, partial transactions carry matching information not in Meta data but in their payload. By default, DevTest broker does not access a transaction’s payload for stitching information. Therefore, partial transactions that store matching information in their payload are not stitched together out-of-the-box.
DevTest broker supports extending and customizing its stitching procedure. DevTest Continuous Application Insight users can exploit this extension mechanism to extend and customize DevTest’s standard stitching algorithm adding stitching based on custom payload content.
This document guides the user creating and deploying a DevTest broker extension example for DevTest 9.0. This DevTest broker extension stitches together partial transactions based on data in the payload of JMS messages. The transaction frames were captured from different services in the Cars Demo application. The Cars Demo application is available in DevTest 9.0.
lijbi01 from CA Continuous Application Insight Development team gratefully provided several code samples and lots of instructions and insights.
Feedback and comments are welcome.