I have a set of webservice endpoints. I'd like to use AppDynamics to collect metrics on the performance & error rate of these endpoints. Are Business Transactions the right tool to use for this? If not, then what are Business Transactions useful for?
(The documentation explains that Business Transactions monitor a single transaction from end-to-end. I should conceptualize my transactions "from the end user's perspective" etc. But this doesn't answer my question - what usecase do Business Transactions fulfill that isn't better suited to Information Points or Service Endpoints etc.?)
If we take the example of an ECommerce Application:
Business Transactions are Checkout, Landing Page, Add to Cart etc. which are known by every end user of the application. These business transactions cover all the method executions, database calls, web service calls etc.
Service End Points are the sub calls(method call or web service call) execute inside of the Business Transactions. Such as "Check Inventory" service which is executed in Checkout and Add to Cart transactions as well.
Information Points are the key business or technical metric counts, such as Checkout amount, Add to Cart item count.
Service End Points and Information Points only give you performance metrics but Business Transactions also give you full code visibility with "call graphs"
Also, there are some limitations like max 200 Business Transaction on the default but you can change these rules.
While configuring the BTs & SEs, you must focus on the needs of AppDynamics users. If you configure AppDynamics for mostly business teams, I can use BTs like I described above. But If you target the Dev and Ops teams, you can configure your BTs based on method or service calls.
There is no only single approach on BT & SE configuration. You must shape that with the needs of your AppDynamics users.