Getting granular reports with APM

Question

I am trying to find a way to report on the APM.  I need to be able to look at particular requests that come in to the server and report how many times that request was made and how long it took so that I can report that this particular function was
run 100 times and of those 100 times it ran longer than 15sec 2 times.  The SLA for our app is very detailed in that a particular report must run in say 15sec 95% of the time.  Another one might be 30sec 95% of the time.  So I need to be able
to look at each particular request that hits the web server and then roll the performance stats by each request.  I can see in the reports that it captures the number of requests total for the whole application and how many performance exceptions there
were.  Unfortunetely it doesn't break it down by every request.  Just the ones that caused the exceptions.  I've thought about setting the threshold to 0 so that it would capture all requests but I don't think that would be good for SCOM server. 
I'm also thinking that because the threshold is at say 15sec that any details about requests that are less than 15seconds would not be in the database and therefore not reportable.  I'd like to know if what I'm trying to do is possible in SCOM and if
I just need a custom report written or if the data is even in the database.  Thanks for helping.

Answer 1

Hi,
Actually APM is not intended to collect every and each monitored request, it should report only unique performance or exception violations.
Setting the threshold to 0 is not a good idea from performance standpoint, besides you will be overwhelmed with events corresponding to normal behavior of your application. And even this won't solve your problem for sure - some of the events still may
have been throttled and been not reported..
However there are two options for a sort of statistics you need:
1. Based on performance counters
Define each separate request you want to gather statistics as transaction (http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh457578.aspx) of monitored application. Thus you will start
collecting separate performance counters metrics for this specific request, among them you will find:
- Average request time
- Number and rate of performance problems
- Number and rate of exceptions
- Number of monitored requests
Yes, these would be only counters without much details, but they represent monitoring statistics regardless the thresholds, throttling and whatever else - just pure statistics.
2. Based on only collected events
I would recommend considering to watch out "Application Slow Requests Analysis" report under "Problem Analysis Reports" of AppAdvisor - this is the most evident insight on the performance trends you're looking for:
Igor Savchenko, VIAcode Consulting LLC (http://www.viacode.com/)