Terminology

Span represents some time that the application has spent executing in one thread. Spans may be started and finished. Once a span starts, it becomes associated with the current processing thread and all root causes, which are detected within that thread are associated with the active span.

A span may contain any number of child spans. Child spans may be associated with threads either in the same JVM, or in a different JVM, which also is monitored by the Plumbr Java Agent.

A span may have metadata associated with it, which is shown in the single transaction view of an unhealthy transaction which that span belongs to.

A Transaction is a tree of spans, which consists of a root span and all of its children. The transaction has some additional properties that describe that tree of spans. These properties include:

• a transaction ID (a UUID, generated automatically)
• a service name (taken from the root span)
• an identifier of a user (taken from the root span)