Setting Up Monitoring
Before you can analyze anything in Flopsar, you decide what to observe. This section walks through that setup, from getting an agent connected to shaping exactly which method executions are captured and ensuring sensitive values are protected.
Unlike tools that force you to predict in advance which metrics you will need, Flopsar lets you choose what to instrument and adjust it as you learn — often at runtime, without changing your application's source code.
The setup workflow
A typical path from "nothing configured" to "useful data" looks like this:
Connect an agent. An agent runs inside your JVM and reports under an application identity. Confirm it is connected and healthy in the Agents view. (Provisioning the agent's key and deploying the agent itself are administrator tasks; see Installation and Authentication, Authorization & Identity.)
Create a profile. A profile is the named set of monitoring rules for an application — the container for everything you decide to observe.
Choose instrumentation. Within the profile, select the classes and methods to watch and whether to capture parameters. See Instrumentation. You can refine this as you narrow down a problem.
Classify with filters and services. Use Filters & Services to group meaningful entry points and focus on the executions that matter.
Protect sensitive data. Configure Data Masking so that values matching your patterns are redacted before they are stored.
Once data is flowing, move on to Observing & Diagnosing to put it to work.
Choosing what to instrument
Instrumentation is a balance:
Too little, and the execution stack is shallow and gaps hide the cause (remember that what you see is an assembled stack).
Too much, and you add overhead and capture noise.
A practical approach is to start broad at the entry points you care about, look at the resulting execution stacks, and then drill in — adding instrumentation to the methods that turn out to be interesting. Because changes can be applied dynamically, this iterative loop is fast.
Roles and permissions
Setting up monitoring requires the appropriate permissions (for example, to view agents, and to view, edit, and deploy profiles). If an action is unavailable to you, your role may not grant it; see Authentication, Authorization & Identity. All profile, instrumentation, masking, and filter changes are recorded in the audit trail.
A note on overhead and safety
Because the agent runs inside your application, instrumentation has a cost and, in the extreme, can affect application behavior. Prefer to validate significant instrumentation changes in a non-production environment first, scope changes to what you need, and watch application overhead after applying them. See Known Risks & Limitations.
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