Having SGAgent attached, let’s see how Seagence works. Know that Seagence is not just an error tracking/monitoring tool. Seagence’s main feature is autonomous detection of probable defects and their root cause in realtime. While Seagence’s error tracking capabilities can be found on SeagenceWeb portal (Seagence automatically records all exceptions and errors thrown by your application, you don’t need to post them) here we will demonstrate Seagence’s main feature i.e. detecting defects in realtime. For this we will do a small exercise in Dev environment. Select a simple GET (or POST) operation in your application that invokes some business function. For example one that fetches and processes some data from DB (select a simple operation because you will need to invoke this operation a 100 times for Seagence to collect enough data. In production you will have huge number of users using the application, so data collection is not a problem in production).

Introduce a defect

The best way to get the hang of how Seagence works is by introducing a defect in the selected GET operation and see how Seagence detects it. We introduce the defect in dev environment only and will remove it after the exercise. To do that add below code either in your Controller class or any other class (before business rules/logic starts executing when the GET operation is invoked) as shown below.

Define a static field variable

     public static int counter = 0;

and then add these below lines at the start of the method body of Controller class or other class where business logic starts executing in the selected GET operation.

     counter++;
     if(counter == 10 || counter == 20 || counter == 30 || counter == 40 || counter == 50 || counter == 60 || counter == 70 || counter == 80 || counter == 90 || counter == 100) {
          throw new NullPointerException();
     }

There is no rocket science here, we are just telling the selected GET operation to fail 10 times. Now invoke the operation few more than 100 times and we know that 10 of those invocations will fail.

Detecting the defect

Now that Seagence collected enough data it is time to create the baseline. Seagence automatically creates incremental baseline at regular interval. In this exercise, instead of waiting for Seagence to create the baseline, you create the baseline by login into SeagenceWeb, go to Baseline tab and click “Create Baseline”. At this time you will receive alert for failed invocations (one alert per failure cluster, with a count of failures. A cluster is a group of similar invocations), so now check your inbox. Also check Clusters tab on SeagenceWeb for more debug information.

Alert not received? Check if enough data is collected. Click “View Data” link in Baseline tab which will list amount of data collected per endpoint. Is the data size greater than 100 for our GET operation? If not invoke the operation few more times, create Baseline again and see that alert is sent for failed invocations.

You will find more debug information on SeagenceWeb, under Clusters tab.

Still have not received alert? You might need some help, please post your question to info@seagence.com.