Transactions

By default, each transaction is automatically given a name consisting of the last two parts of SCRIPT_FILENAME (for example web/index.php) as the transaction name.

If you are using a framework supported by Tideways, then the transaction name will be the controller class / action method that is being executed (for example App\Controller\UserController::viewAction).

See the list of supported frameworks.

If you are using a currently unsupported MVC framework, then a programmatic assignment of the transaction names will provide much more insight than the default script name based naming, that Tideways relies on. See docs on the programmatic Transaction API to manually set transaction names in your application code.

The number of transactions is restricted based on the project license and upgrades. It is therefore recommended that you set transaction names based on blocks of code that are countable and known, rather than based on URLs or database entries which could potentially be infinite.

Transaction Visibility can be "Full", "Limited" or "Ignored". Each state has its own limits per project that are shown on the Project License page.

Once the limit of "Full" visibility transactions is reached, further transactions are still created but have their visibility set to "Limited" instead of "Full".

A transaction with the same name will be counted as multiple transactions if it is used more than one environment or service. Transactions in environments with "Limited" visibility always have "Limited" visibility on their own by default. They can be changed to "Full" visibility manually.

"Limited" visibility transactions are stored only with their request count, average response time and failure rate. Traces of a limited transaction are deprioritized during sampling and are only kept if not enough traces of full transactions are collected.

After the "limited" visibility transaction limit is reached all additional transactions are created with the visibility ignored until another limit is reached and they are grouped into a single "catch all" transaction named "Uncategorized".

Ignored transactions do not count towards the service monitoring data, collect no own monitoring data, no traces and no exception data.

You can change the visilibity of each transaction on different screens:

In addition a daily cleanup job performs the following tasks:

The following tables describe the transaction limits and behavior in different licenses and plans:

Every transaction has a failure threshold setting that affects when the transaction failure rate notification is triggered. By default a transaction has no failure threshold configured and you can change it to become:

For simplicity and to enable bulk editing of this setting for many transactions, it is not possible to set a custom value.

To change the failure threshold of a transaction you can either open the "Edit" configuration dialog of the transaction individually, or use the bulk action to change the failure threshold of several transactions at the same time.

You can delete individual transactions from their actions menu in the transaction settings screen.

This action helps to manually free up the transaction limit if you are at the maximum and want to replace old transactions forcefully and do not want to wait on the cleanup job to free up space.

Be aware that removing a transaction that is still active will only lead to the transaction being created again.

After you have started using transaction names based on framework or manual support, you can go one step further and set a human readable name for all transactions or just for the ones which you care about the most.

Doing so improves the utility of Tideways, because it frees you from having to know what page each listed controller/action is responsible for — especially for the non-technical users in the weekly report. For example in the transaction list:

Or in the transaction detail page:

To configure a human-readable transaction name:

Following this, you will then see the configured human-readable name, in the Name column, next to the transaction in the transactions list.

If you want to start over with a new transaction naming schema, you can go to "Project Settings" > "General Settings" and perform the "Delete all Transactions" action.