Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Documentation

Application Performance Monitoring Terminology

Here's a list of common Application Performance Monitoring (APM) terms:

Term Description
Application Performance Index (APDEX) APDEX is an open standard that enables you to measure user satisfaction based on the response time of applications and services.
APM Control Plane APM control plane provides standard create, read, update, delete, and list operations to work with APM domains.
APM Domains APM domain is an Oracle Cloud Infrastructure resource type, which contains the systems being monitored by Application Performance Monitoring.

Each APM domain is created in a standard Oracle Cloud Infrastructure compartment, and you can define Oracle Cloud Infrastructure access control policies to grant access to the APM domain to a specific set of users.

APM domains are of the following types and you specify the type when creating an APM domain:

  • Always Free: An Always Free APM domain enables you to initially use Application Performance Monitoring. You can create one Always Free APM domain per region and use it to process 1000 spans per hour, and trace data is available for a period of 31 days. In addition, you can execute up to 10 availability monitor runs per hour in an Always Free APM domain.

    Note that more than a 1000 spans are throttled per hour in an Always Free APM domain.

  • Paid: A paid APM domain enables you to use all Application Performance Monitoring features. You can create paid APM domains per region to logically group your use cases.
APM Browser Agents APM Browser agents record user interaction with websites and send spans and metrics to Application Performance Monitoring.
APM Java Agents APM Java agents record spans and metrics from application servers and send them to Application Performance Monitoring.
APM Tracers APM Tracers record OpenTracing spans with application metrics and send spans and metrics to Application Performance Monitoring.
Dashboards Dashboards are data visualization tools that provide a quick insight into the health and performance of your applications, and help identify outliers and take corrective action.
Data Keys Data Keys are required to ensure that Application Performance Monitoring accepts the observations gathered by the data sources. The data keys are generated when an APM domain is created, and are of two types:
  • Public Data Key
  • Private Data Key
Data Sources Data sources is the term used to collectively refer to all the agents, availability monitors (formerly known as synthetic monitors), and tracers that obtain the data you need to monitor your application and diagnose issues.
Data Upload Endpoint Data Upload Endpoint is the URL to which a data source sends observations. The Data Upload Endpoint is generated when an APM domain is created, and each APM domain has its own Data Upload Endpoint.
Monitors Monitors are Availability Monitoring (formerly known as Synthetic Monitoring) tools that enable you to specify a base URL or upload and run user scripts to synthetically test and monitor your applications across various geographical locations.
Queries Queries are a simplified SQL-like syntax that enable you to customize, filter, and display traces and spans in Trace Explorer.
Real User Monitoring (RUM) Real User Monitoring is a performance monitoring technology, which captures and analyzes each user interaction with a website or application.
Scripts Scripts are recorded user paths that are used to simulate user transactions on the application.
Spans Spans are operations or logical units of work with a name, start time, and duration, within a trace.
Traces Traces are the complete flow of a request as it passes through all the components of a distributed system in a given period of time.
Thread Snapshots Thread snapshots are stack dumps of thread executing a span.
Vantage Points Vantage points are locations on which you can define and run availability monitors. Vantage Points are of two types:
  • Public Vantage Points: A diverse set of pre-configured locations around the globe from where you can run monitors.
  • Dedicated Vantage Points: Locations that you can set up in your tenancy to ensure that you can securely run your monitors.

For information on general Oracle Cloud Infrastructure terms such as Compartment, see Key Concepts and Terminology.