Examining Incidents in Team Explorer

Glossary Item Box

PreEmptive Analytics exception reporting includes a special work item type named Incident to contain information about exceptions that match the rules defined for the PreEmptive Analytics aggregator service. It also includes the PreEmptive Analytics Aggregator Visualizer extension which includes a Team Explorer pane that allows you to view Incident items and reports and configure the aggregator service rules.

Prerequisites

• Visual Studio or Team Explorer installed.
• PreEmptive Analytics endpoint services deployed.
• TFS project provisioned for PreEmptive Analytics via the Configuration Utility.
• Exception report messages sent from application instrumented with exception reporting.
• PreEmptive Analytics aggregator service deployed and rules defined for instrumented application.

The PreEmptive Analytics hub

When a team project has been provisioned for PreEmptive Analytics via the PreEmptive Analytics Configuration Utility, the PreEmptive Analytics hub will appear as an option in the Team Explorer pane of Visual Studio. The PreEmptive Analytics hub provides access to Incident items and administrative reports concerning the frequency and number of open Incident items. It also allows you to configure exception sets and rules for the project in question. Unlike the PreEmptive Analytics Configuration Utility which must be executed by a user with full administrative access to the Team Foundation Server, the configuration interface provided by the PreEmptive Analytics hub in Visual Studio can be operated by any user that has been granted administrative rights to the team project in question, and he or she will only be able to configure rules for that project. For more information about configuring exception sets and rules, see the Defining Exception Sets and Rules topic.

The Incident work item type

The Incident work item contains a number of useful fields which will provide insight into the types of exceptions your instrumented applications are experiencing in production.

• The Title field is automatically populated with the name of the rule that caused the incident to be created, the type of the exception, and the name of the application that experienced the exception.
• The Classification section shows the company name, application name, and application version as they were configured during instrumentation of the application that experienced the exception.
• The Exception tab shows the full stack trace of the exception that caused the work item to be created. Inner exceptions are also shown below the top-level exception, if available.
• The Incident Details tab shows unique data that may have accompanied each exception report message:
  • If the application was configured to send unique instance identifiers during instrumentation, the Instance ID column will contain the identifier of the application instance that experienced the exception.
  • If configured during instrumentation and if provided by the user that experienced the exception, the Contact and Comment columns may contain user-supplied contact information and user-supplied comments about the exception.
  • The Host Info column contains information about the machine on which the exception occurred.
  • The Loaded Components column contains the assemblies or components that were loaded in the application at the time the exception occurred.
• In the Metrics section, the number of individual exception reports received that matched the rule is shown in the Raw Exception Count field.
• If the application was configured to send unique instance identifiers during instrumentation, the Exception Count By Instance field will show the number of different instances of the application (as defined by unique serial number or other unique instance identifier) that have experienced the exception.
• The Accept New Data dropdown allows you to turn off further updates to this work item. When this setting is enabled, as new exceptions are received that continue to match the rule the aggregated counts in the work item will be updated and additional detail data will be added to the Incident Details view. If you switch this setting to No, no further updates to the work item or incident details will be made and any exception messages that continue to match the rule will be ignored. You can switch this setting back to Yes at any time to resume updating the work item and incident details. Any past exception reports (up to the configured Data Retention Days setting) that were received during the time the Accept New Data value was set to No will be immediately processed and added to the work item.

See Also

Configuring your Team Projects for PreEmptive Analytics
Defining Exception Sets and Rules

© 2012 PreEmptive Solutions. All rights reserved.