When I see certain data from Dynatrace, sometimes it appears in a different order from which I have seen it before. I tracked this initially in Synthetic waterfalls, but am seeing it Platform wide.
I imagine that the problem is related to the use of JSON, and that it does not support the notion of ordering. In some part of the process, probably in the creation of server side JSON, data gets randomly shuffled. Two examples of how this impacts the data we see on the Platform:
- In synthetic measurements, if two or more resources are loaded at the same millisecond, they sometimes are seen in a different order. For the same measurement, img1 might sometimes come before img2, but it might also come afterwards. This is clearly not desirable, as there was an order when the measurement was done, and that should always prevail.
- In API usage, it's pretty easy to detect. Just get a list long enough of User Actions, for instance, and if there are several at the same millisecond, subsequent queries will probably result in different ordering of the actions.
Initially I thought it might also be client side, and it may. But I have done some testing on the API data, and the analysis I'm doing clearly shows it's coming from the server.
While order might not be considered important at these levels, it would be important to perceive why this is happening?
Antonio Sousa
