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Why was Exception Analysis changed???

AntonioSousa
DynaMight Guru
DynaMight Guru

I use exception analysis a lot. Today, I was surprised to see that it was changed to the MDA view...

Not sure if this is some feature flag that was put on my user, or if it really changed? In either case, a lot of functionality was lost, nothing was announced, and simply productivity goes down the drain!

Even worse, nothing was changed in the documentation, as can be seen for instance in
https://www.dynatrace.com/support/help/how-to-use-dynatrace/diagnostics/exception-analysis/

I'm putting in a RFE, because changing existing functionality that works OK, with new functionality that doesn't work, is not a good way forward, in my opinion...


EDIT: To everyone asking for the RFE, I did not put in a "rollback" RFR. I put in one more generic, asking for these changes to be pre-announced, or possibly with an opt-in, like the recent problems view change:

https://community.dynatrace.com/spaces/483/dynatrace-product-ideas/idea/245794/rfe-pre-announce-chan...

Antonio Sousa
15 REPLIES 15

I just noticed that. We totally lost the possibility to perform advanced analysis on exception message...the MDA doesn't provide the possibility to show data by message!

Please link the RFE here I will put my vote.

EDIT: It seems it is still available here: https:/xxxxx.live.dynatrace.com/#exceptionsoverview

mdouds
Helper

This functionality-removal just impacted our teams this morning. We were trying to understand all the services impacted by a specific exception, and only see the "any" or "missing" options for exception class. This is bad...

Filtering on Request Attribute values has also been removed from Diagnostic Tools > Top Web requests within the past week or two, now only allowing "any" or "missing."

Can you provide a link to your RFE?

Hi Michael,

it should still be possible to filter by specific exceptions otherwise this would be a bug. Just add the filter "Exception" and type in a name. The same works for request attributes. I'm talking with our UX team how this can be better highlighted in the UI.

I can confirm this is possible, just the UI seems as it is not.

Certified Dynatrace Master | Alanata a.s., Slovakia, Dynatrace Master Partner

That's a huge relief, thank you! Agreed, not having the textbox appear (like on the service details page filter) made it confusing for us.

tom_rothschaedl
Dynatrace Helper
Dynatrace Helper

Hello Antonio,

sorry to hear that the update was not precepted well - the Exception analysis, along with the Top web requests and Top database statements have been consolidated that the look and feel and capabilities of the different specialized analysis tools are the same.

The exception analysis is now much more powerful as it now also allows to define custom splittings, to store and share your existing analysis views and also to easily create metrics out of it.

Filtering by messages is still available when going to the “Exception details” via the menu next to a service or exception class.


The overhaul of the specific help pages is currently ongoing and they should be available soon. We will improve here to synchronize this better in the future.

Can you give me more insights which specific functionality are you missing in the new perspective?

Hi @Thomas R. It's nice to have the MDA splittings, but does not help if we want to filter on a specific exception:


In the above example, I don't have a filter applied. Even with specific filters applied, the exception list is still truncated, making it difficult to find a specific exception that may not occur frequently.

This is a huge step back in functionality.

Hi @Thomas R. I agree with Michael. The MDA is quite advanced but we need something much more simple: search for the exception and analyze it. That's it. If you provide use advanced analysis dimension but without a fast and efficient way to search the exceptions it is a mess. The big limit of the MDA, as Michael explained, is that the data is truncated. Most often we get exceptions not very frequent that have a HUGE impact on our environments. If we truncate it by the most frequent ones, we loose visibility into the critical issues. More, we cannot anymore filter by a substring contained in the exception class. It was possible on the old view:

Hope it helps you understand the issue here and for now I will keep using the old one hoping you will not remove that

Hi @Thomas R.,

Quite sincerely, there are so many problems, that I don't know where to start.

You can't do anything in a timeframe bigger than 24 hours. Period. Why?

While I use MDA quite a bit, people less familiar with it don't have a clue on how to use it.

Changes were totally unannounced. I discovered this while in the middle of a presentation to a potential client. I got stuck...

Well, basically unusable. No RFEs solved. Not announced. No documentation. Complete mess...

Antonio Sousa

I would also add that MDA is much slower than old Exception analysis. Again, MDA loads a lot of additional data we don't really care about cause it is a generic view. At least when it comes to Exception / Error analysis we absolutely need dedicated view focused on error analysis only. It is a pain and it is quite confusing to use a view focused on transaction analytics also for exeception analysis.

AlanZ
Helper

Hi there, just got the surprise today. We use to be able to find requests easily across our environment but now can't because of the MDA limitations. Got support involved and we now have to get an RFE going to get the functionnality back. Is this post the new RFE to get the Diagnostic tools fonctionalities back ? Anyone can point me to it otherwise ?


This blog post actually describes our use case very well :

https://www.dynatrace.com/news/blog/analyze-the-top-web-requests-across-all-your-services/

"the ability to analyze the top web requests across all services within a monitored environment and to search for the specific URLs underlying these web requests"

alicia_pepper
Organizer

was RFE ever opened we can upvote? Please share!

Hello @Thomas R. can you please provide a feedback about this discussion? Do you think you can evaluate to bring us back the old view?

dave_mauney
Dynatrace Champion
Dynatrace Champion

To temporarily use the old views, you may have luck with these:

/#exceptionsoverview

/#topdbstatements

/#topglobalwebrequests

I've seen all three work in a 1.202 environment today, but only the first works right now in a 1.205 environment.

I had already checked it out with Davide's comment. But since I was using it mainly at the service level, I hadn't tried it out. But it does work, you just have to stick it (#exceptionsoverview ) together:

https://aaa12345.live.dynatrace.com/#exceptionsoverview;sci=SERVICE-123456789ABCDEF;servicefilter=0%1E10%11SERVICE_METHOD_GROUP-AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA;gtf=-2h;gf=all;tab=RT 

Tested with 1.205

Antonio Sousa

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