docs: Transaction metrics reference

[bmorelli25]

Summary

Alphabetizes the config reference and adds reference docs for transaction metrics.

For a number of good reasons, this is still opt-in. How much do we want to publicize this? Better worded: do we need more than just reference documentation for this feature yet?

Related issues

Closes #4031

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• Build Cause: [Pull request #4345 updated]

• Start Time: 2020-11-02T21:25:14.589+0000

• Duration: 7 min 6 sec

[axw]

Thank you!

[axw]

I'm not sure if we should document this one. I think this will end up going away in favour of the updating the agents to stop sending unsampled transactions. Also, I suspect this config might be incompatible with RUM/User Experience monitoring, where we probably want to record individual requests without a full sampled trace.

[bmorelli25]

If we do remove this config from the docs, do the apm-server.aggregation.transactions.* configs still result in storage reduction? I want to make sure your previous suggested change still holds true if we remove this.

[axw]

Ahh good point. Indeed, storage reduction relies on us discarding the unsampled transaction docs.
I guess we should keep it then, and just mark it as experimental.

[dgieselaar]

This feature is also opt-in in Kibana. Do we need docs for that as well?

[bmorelli25]

This feature is also opt-in in Kibana. Do we need docs for that as well?

Yes. Is it xpack.apm.searchAggregatedTransactions? I can add a note to these docs with a link to https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/kibana/current/apm-settings-in-kibana.html and vice versa.

Also, question: When I enable this, how do I know that it's working? What can I look for?

[axw]

Also, question: When I enable this, how do I know that it's working? What can I look for?

With the example config

apm-server:
  aggregation:
    transactions:
      enabled: true
      interval: 1m
  sampling:
    keep_unsampled: false

Configure the agent to sample, and you should end up with a distribution chart that looks roughly correct. If Kibana were not configured with searchAggregatedTransactions, then the charts would show numbers based on only the sampled transactions.

[bmorelli25]

Perfect. Thanks for your help, @axw.

Kib PR: elastic/kibana#82379

[cyrille-leclerc]

@bmorelli25 I searched how to create a graph from Transaction as Histograms and didn't find the docs searching on Google. Do we have an SEO question here?

[bmorelli25]

@bmorelli25 I searched how to create a graph from Transaction as Histograms and didn't find the docs searching on Google. Do we have an SEO question here?

@cyrille-leclerc That's a result of only adding reference documentation for this feature. There's no how-to guide with a Googlable H1. This plays into the thread on Slack... Would you mind opening an issue?

[cyrille-leclerc]

FYI I created

• https://github.com/elastic/observability-docs/issues/1335