Docs » Introduction to Splunk APM

Introduction to Splunk APM đź”—

Collect traces and spans to monitor your distributed applications with Splunk Application Performance Monitoring (APM). A trace is a collection of actions, or spans, that occur to complete a transaction. Splunk APM collects and analyzes every span and trace from each of the services that you have connected to Splunk Observability Cloud to give you full-fidelity access to all of your application data.

For scenarios using Splunk APM, see Scenarios for troubleshooting errors and monitoring application performance using Splunk APM.

Get your data into Splunk APM¶

To start using APM, see Set up Splunk APM.

If you have already instrumented your applications but are not seeing your data coming into APM as you expect, see Troubleshoot your instrumentation.

For information about Splunk APM scenarios, see Scenarios for troubleshooting errors and monitoring application performance using Splunk APM.

To see an example of using Splunk Observability Cloud components together, see Scenario: Kai troubleshoots an issue from the browser to the back end using Splunk Observability Cloud.

What can you do with Splunk APM?¶

The following table provides an overview of what you can do with Splunk APM:

Do this

With this tool

Link to documentation

View all of your services and their dependency relationships in the service map.

Service map

Explore the service map

Monitor endpoints in your services using Endpoint Performance. Using the filter, sort, and compare functionality within Endpoint Performance, you can quickly isolate endpoints with increased requests, errors, or duration that impact your services’ performance.

Endpoint performance

Scenario: Alex monitors service performance using endpoint performance

Monitor the impact of your database queries on service availability to identify long-running, unoptimized, or heavy queries and mitigate issues they might be causing.

Database Query Performance

Get visibility into code-level performance using AlwaysOn Profiling, a feature of Splunk APM. AlwaysOn Profiling takes CPU and memory snapshots from runtime environments to contextualize spans and traces produced by instrumented applications.

AlwaysOn Profiling

Scenarios for monitoring applications and services using Splunk AlwaysOn Profiling

Use detectors to alert on sudden changes in your request, error, and duration (RED) metrics to stay on top of your services’ performance. There are autodetect detectors that are configured by default for service latency, error rate, and request rate. There are also built-in conditions available for you to configure detectors for the changes in performance metrics that matter most to you.

Detectors and alerts

Index span tags to break down and analyze application performance along any dimension, so that you can customize views like Tag Spotlight to your particular needs.

Span tags

Add context to spans with span tags in Splunk APM

View the request and error rate or latency of your services by each of your indexed span tags in Tag Spotlight. For instance, you can see at a glance how your services are performing by endpoint, environment, or span.kind in Tag Spotlight. Filter this view by environments, services, Business Workflows, or span tags for a finer-grained look.

Tag Spotlight

Analyze service performance with Tag Spotlight

Search and filter full-fidelity trace data to troubleshoot issues. Run aggregations as needed on trace data to identify problems across any tag or attribute. View patterns in your traces to understand how latency or errors impact specific customer groups.

Trace Analyzer

Explore your traces using Trace Analyzer in Splunk APM

Correlate traces that make up end-to-end transactions in your system to monitor the workflows you care about most.

Business Workflows

Correlate traces to track Business Workflows

Use built-in dashboards to assess service, endpoint, and system health at a glance.

Built-in dashboards

Built-in dashboards