Context-specific drill down menus simplify service analysis

We’re excited to release a major upgrade to the user experience of Dynatrace service analysis. Context-specific drill-down menus are now available to simplify navigation and filtering of results presented on Dynatrace service-analysis views.

Context-sensitive filters

Context-specific filters are now available on nearly all service analysis pages that feature table-based layouts (see examples below). Look for this new filter button on the right-hand end of each table row: 

Click any row’s filter button to filter the entire page based on the contents of the selected row. Have a look at the example service Details page below. Clicking the filter button of a specific service instance in the service instance table will filter the entire page to show only the results of that specific service instance. Similarly, clicking the filter button of a specific request attribute on the Request attributes tab will filter the entire page to show only those results that relate to the selected request attribute.

This feature is particularly useful for more complex service analysis views, like Service-level backtrace (see below).

The new context-sensitive filters enable you to quickly slice through vast amounts of data in just a few clicks, but there’s much more you can do by expanding the Analyze context-sensitive menus.

Context-sensitive drill-down menus

The Analyze menus (available for results on all table-based service analysis pages) reveal all possible drill downs and analysis options based on the current context. Have a look at the expanded Analyze menu below. In this example we see options for context-sensitive analysis based on Method hotspots, Outliers, PurePaths, Response time hotspots, Service backtrace, Service comparison, and Service flow.

In the example above, we’ve selected the Customer Frontend service in the Incoming requests to this service section and the orange.jsf request in the Requests from section. This drill-down combination focuses analysis on all orange.jsf requests of the service Customer Frontend that call the JourneyService which in turn call the easyTravel-Business database. These filtering selections are carried over to any analysis option you select from the Analyze menu (see Service flow example below). Previously, doing such analysis was rather complicated. With the Analyze drill down menus, it can now be done in just a few clicks!

While Service flow (see above) doesn’t include tables, you can still access context-sensitive drill-down menus from this view. Click any service in the service flow and you’ll now see a hovering drill-down menu. This makes the available filter actions more intuitive and encourages deeper drill downs. Expect to see this feature on all service views in the near future.

Context-sensitive menus for charts

We recently implemented other drill-down actions that you can take advantage of. Dynatrace provides powerful functionality for charting service request data and request attributes in a multi-dimensional fashion. What has been missing until now was the ability to perform context-sensitive analysis based on individual time series included in charts. This issue has been remedied (see example below). This view now includes all the filtering functionality that’s available on our service-analysis pages, alongside advanced capabilities for charting and splitting based on multiple dimensions.

This makes custom multi-dimensional analysis view much more powerful!

What’s next

But there’s more… we’ll soon make it easier to create such custom analysis views (see the context-sensitive Create chart button in the example below).

Each service overview page will soon feature chart icons on each table row. These will enable you to kick-start the creation of charts based on your service-analysis context. This simplifies the process of creating charts based on custom metrics or request attributes.

We’re very proud of these enhancements and believe they will make your Dynatrace experience even better. We welcome any feedback and suggestions for further improving these enhancements.