Troubleshooting Performance Issues with Dynatrace

If you’ve worked in IT, you know how frustrating sudden performance issues can be. Everything is running delicate one moment, and the following response times slow to a crawl, leaving users frustrated. These problems always seem to happen at the worst possible time. Finding the root cause can feel overwhelming, but Dynatrace makes it easier by breaking the problem down step by step.

The response time charts are a good place to start. They show when things started going wrong and which services were affected. Comparing them with typical performance helps pinpoint when the issue began. The Split by Services feature makes it easy to see if the problem involves just one service or multiple areas. Once the struggling service is identified, Split by Dimension helps dig deeper, showing patterns like a slow API call, database query, or request type.

Setting response time thresholds is another helpful trick. Filtering requests that take longer than 500ms helps focus on the most significant slowdowns and track how they behave before, during, and after the issue. But slowdowns aren’t always caused by internal problems. Many come from network delays, slow database queries, or third-party services. Checking network speed, database response times and API performance can help determine if something external is causing the problem.

It's essential to think about what changed right before the slowdown started. A sudden spike in traffic could be the reason. Sometimes, the system is overloaded, and high CPU usage and low memory can all cause slowdowns. A step-by-step approach helps you avoid guessing and find the real issue faster.

Now, let’s put this into action. Look closely at the Dynatrace response time chart below and see what stands out.

The first person to spot the issue will get one hour of free Dynatrace consulting to fine-tune their system.

Keep up the great work! Happy Performance Engineering! #PerformanceMonitoring #Dynatrace #Troubleshooting