Setting up IPA Transactions

IPA Transactions Flows

To help in your analysis of probe data points, in determining SLAs and other cool stuff IPA will group probe data points into Transactions Flows.

• Automatically and initially, IPA Transactions are grouped by your users sessions;
• For each user in your site, going through the flow/process of your application, IPA will start a transaction by grouping the probe data points by that user session (specifically, if no IPA Transaction group exists when the process passes through the first probe, IPA will define that as a beginning of a transaction);
• To get control, you can define explicitly when a transaction begins and ends, marking those specific probes in the SetTransaction field;
• You will want that each time the user goes through a specific process or set of steps in the application, or even in the background/server when your application is doing a series of tasks, to have defined a specific transaction flow being made.

Transactions can branch without limit or join (passing through the same probe) depending on your application code, since what you define are the transaction begins & ends, in the probe itself. So in your process you may have multiple transaction begins or ends, which you define in each probe:

This way, IPA will group each set of probes, starting with a probe marked with a Transaction Begin and ending in probe marked with a Transaction End as a specific Transaction - and show the series of probe flows (AKA transactions) in the IPA Flows page.

• If the first probe that the code passes through for a specific user session has no begin/end parameter configuration, IPA will create a new transaction beginning in that probe.
• If the code passes through a probe with a BeginTransaction while another transaction is already defined, IPA ends the previous transaction flow and starts a new one.

In the IPA Flows page you can edit the name of each IPA Transaction Flow, so it's name represents a meaningful process flow in the application:

As your users start using your application and go through the probes, so will IPA show different groups of probes as different transactions flows in the above screen, and you'll be able to edit that particular flow's name.