Trends in application errors over time

You might need to detect trends in application errors over time when doing the following:

• Using stack traces to detect application errors

Prerequisites 

In order to execute this procedure in your environment, the following data, services, or apps are required:

• Application data

Example

Most applications are coded to emit errors, warnings, and other problems to log files as they occur. It's not uncommon for applications to continuously emit a steady stream of errors. However, sudden increases in the volume of errors or a rise in error volumes over time might be a sign of a problem with the application. You want to monitor for spikes.

NOTE: To optimize the search shown below, you should specify an index and a time range.

1. Run the following search: 

host = <host to look at> (error OR fail* OR warn)
| timechart span=5m count

Search explanation

The table provides an explanation of what each part of this search achieves. You can adjust this query based on the specifics of your environment.

Result

The result of this search is a bar chart that shows the frequency of errors over time. This is useful to see if errors occur more frequently at certain times. If so, look for a correlation with load or release dates of new code or patches.