Mute monitoring of problematic service requests

Dynatrace monitors all server-side server requests end-to-end. When the performance or success rate of a specific request degrades, Dynatrace raises an alert. However not all high-load requests are important and not all slow requests should raise alerts.

A good example of these are heartbeat requests. Heartbeat requests commonly arrive in high volume and frequency. These requests can distort the overall median response times of services. Such requests can trigger response-time alerts that distract you from the performance of the important requests that actually affect the user experience of your applications.

Dynatrace now enables you to mute alerts for problematic service requests and exclude them from the service chart so that you can focus on the performance of the requests that affect your customers.

To mute a request

1. Open the Dynatrace menu and select Transactions & services.
2. On the Services page, select the service that receives the request you want to mute.
3. Click Show all requests on the right-hand side of the page and select the request from the displayed request list.
4. On the request Details page, click the Browse (…) button and then click Mute request.

   The request’s Details page displays the message This request has been muted. Going forward Dynatrace will not alert on this request and record its data separately.
   Muted service requests remain accessible (and even remain visible in request lists for a limited period of time) but their response times are no longer factored into overall metrics and charts. As you can see in the chart below, the number of monitored requests has dropped from what it was previously and the median response time has increased now that the dominating high number of fast requests has been removed. The Median now represents all requests that are not muted. Muted requests will also never raise alerts!

Adjust reference periods for alerting

In some cases muting a high-volume request can result in fake response-time degradation alerts. This only happens in rare cases and the reason is the displayed shift in the median and the corresponding change in the underlying request distribution. if this happens it’s best to reset the Reference period for alerts on this service. By doing this Dynatrace will establish new performance baselines, that excludes the muted request.

To adjust alerting reference periods for your specific service

1. Open the Dynatrace menu and select Transactions & services.
2. On the All monitored services page, select the service that receives the request you’ve muted.
3. On the service page, click the Browse (…) button.
4. Click Edit.
5. Click Anomaly detection.
6. Click Reset.

View muted requests

Data for muted requests is still being recorded, but in a separate place.

To view a muted requests

1. Open the Dynatrace menu and select Transactions & services.
2. On the All monitored services page, select the service that receives the request you’ve muted.
3. On the service page, click the Browse (…) button.
4. Click View muted requests.

Here you have access to all previously muted requests, and here you can also unmute them.

To unmute a request

1. Select the muted request from the Top contributors’ list.
2. On the Method details page, click the Browse (…) button.
3. Click Unmute request.

The request will be removed from the muted request list and new data will be recorded normally again. It will also re-enable alerting for that specific request.