Version: NG-3.1

Classification

Service Classification

The Service Classification page allows you to categorize services based on their business importance so that the most critical services receive greater visibility across APM. This helps operations and engineering teams quickly identify which services deserve immediate attention during incidents, performance degradation, or customer-impacting failures.

By classifying services appropriately, you can make dashboards more meaningful, improve alert prioritization, and ensure that business-critical services stand out clearly from the rest of the application landscape. In APM Studio, services can be classified as either Key or Regular, depending on how important they are to core business operations.

Understanding Service Classification

Service classification is designed to help you distinguish between:

Key services – Services that are critical to business operations, customer experience, or important transaction flows
Regular services – Services that are still monitored normally but do not require prioritized visibility

This is especially useful in large environments where many services are present, but only a smaller set of services directly influence revenue, customer login, checkout, order processing, or other critical journeys.

For example, an API Gateway, Authentication Service, or Checkout Service may be classified as Key, while background or supporting services may remain Regular unless they play a direct role in high-priority business flows.

Service Classification Page Overview

The Service Classification page provides a complete view of your services along with tools to search, filter, and update their classification.

The page includes:

a Search for Services field
Classification filter chips
a Service Type filter
a service list table with recent performance metrics
an Edit action for individual services
a Bulk Actions menu for updating multiple services together
pagination controls for navigating large service lists

This layout makes it easy to review service importance in context, instead of assigning classifications blindly.

Search for Services

Use the Search for Services field to quickly locate a specific service by name. This is especially helpful when your environment contains many discovered services and you want to:

find a service quickly without browsing through multiple pages
verify the current classification of a specific service
update a service immediately
narrow the list before applying filters or bulk actions

The search field is useful during both initial setup and ongoing maintenance, especially when new services are added to the environment over time.

Example

You can search for services such as:

API-Gateway
Authi-Service

Only the matching services are shown in the table, making it easier to review or update them.

Filter by Classification

The Classification filter allows you to narrow the list of services based on their current classification. Available options:

Key
Regular

This filter is useful when you want to:

Review all services currently marked as Key
Identify services that remain Regular
Verify whether all business-critical services have already been prioritized
Audit the overall distribution of service importance across the environment

For example, after an onboarding exercise, you may want to filter by Key to confirm that all core services have been classified correctly.

Filter by Service Type

The Service Type filter helps you narrow the service list based on the type of service.

For example, this may include:

Web Service
Messaging Service
RPC Service

This filter is useful when you want to classify services within a specific category rather than across the entire environment.

For example, if you want to review only customer-facing web services, you can select Web Service and focus your classification decisions only on those services first.

Service Classification Table

The main table on the page displays all discovered services along with their current classification and recent operational metrics. This table is designed to help you make classification decisions using both business context and performance visibility.

The table includes the following columns:

Service Name: Displays the name of the discovered service as it appears in APM. This is the primary identifier you use when searching for or updating a service.
Service Type: Displays the category of the service, such as Web Service, Messaging Service, or RPC Service. This gives you additional context about the role of the service in your architecture.
Classification: Shows whether the service is currently marked as:
- Key
- Regular
Error Rate (7d): Displays the service error rate for the last seven days. This metric helps you identify services that may already be showing reliability concerns and may need closer operational focus.
Throughput (7d): Displays the average transaction or request volume over the last seven days. Higher-throughput services often deserve closer attention because they impact a larger portion of traffic.
Avg. Latency (7d): Displays the average latency observed over the last seven days. This helps identify services that may be affecting user experience or transaction performance.
Actions: Provides the option to edit the classification of an individual service directly from the table.

This makes the page much more useful than a simple list of service names, because you can see how each service is behaving over the last seven days before deciding whether it should be prioritized.

Edit Service Classification

You can update the classification of an individual service using the Edit action available in the Actions column. This is the best option when you want to make a targeted change to a specific service without affecting the rest of the list.

Update the Classification for a Single Service

To update the classification of a service:

Locate the required service in the table.
Click the Edit icon in the Actions column.

The Edit <service-name> priority panel opens on the right.

Under Classification, select:

Key, or
Regular

Click Save to apply the change.

If you do not want to save the change, click Cancel.

This panel provides a quick and simple way to update service importance without leaving the page.

Example: Mark a Critical Service as Key

Suppose Authi-Service is responsible for user authentication and login validation.

To mark it as a key service:

Search for Authi-Service.
Click the Edit icon.
In the side panel, select Key.
Click Save.

Result: The service is now classified as Key and can be treated as a higher-priority service in APM views.

Bulk Actions

The Bulk Actions menu allows you to update the classification of multiple services at the same time. This is especially useful during initial setup, service onboarding, or when you need to quickly reclassify a group of services after an architectural or business change. Instead of editing each service individually, you can select multiple services and apply the same classification in a single action.

Available options include:

Mark as Key
Mark as Regular

Use Bulk Actions

To update multiple services at once:

Select the required services using the checkboxes in the first column.
Click Bulk Actions.
Choose one of the following:
- Mark as Key
- Mark as Regular

The selected services are updated together, which is helpful when prioritizing multiple business-critical services in one step.

Example: Mark Multiple Core Services as Key

Suppose you want to prioritize the main customer-facing entry points of your application.

Select:

API-Gateway
Authi-Service

Then:

Click Bulk Actions.
Select Mark as Key.

Result: Both services are updated to Key classification.

Request Classification

The Request Classification page allows you to classify request patterns based on their operational importance. This helps APM distinguish between requests that should be closely monitored and highlighted, and requests that generate low-value traffic that can add noise to dashboards, reports, and metrics.

By defining request classification rules, you can ensure that critical application requests remain visible and prioritized, while repetitive or non-business-critical requests such as static asset calls, health checks, or background endpoints can be marked appropriately. This improves the quality of observability data and helps teams focus on the requests that matter most during monitoring and troubleshooting.

Understanding Request Classification

Request classification helps APM separate important request traffic from non-essential request traffic.

Key Requests

Key requests are requests that are important to customer journeys, business workflows, or application health. These requests should remain visible and prioritized because they directly influence how teams understand application behavior.

Typical examples include:

checkout APIs
payment APIs
login or authentication endpoints
order placement APIs
user-facing transactional requests

Noise Requests

Noise requests are requests that generate volume but do not add meaningful business insight. These requests may be frequent, repetitive, or technically necessary, but they are usually not useful when analyzing application performance or business transactions.

Typical examples include:

static asset requests such as JS, CSS, and image files
health check endpoints
readiness or liveness probes
internal framework or utility endpoints
repetitive polling endpoints that do not reflect real business activity

When these requests are not classified properly, they can distort request counts, clutter dashboards, and make it harder to focus on customer-impacting traffic.

Request Classification Page Overview

The Request Classification page provides a central view of all configured request patterns along with their classification and recent performance data.

The page includes:

a Search for Request Patterns field
Classification filter chips
a + Pattern button to add a new request classification rule
a table showing configured request patterns
row-level Edit and Remove actions
a Bulk Actions menu for updating multiple patterns together
pagination controls for navigating the list

Search for Request Patterns

Use the Search for Request Patterns field to quickly find an existing request classification rule by pattern.

This is useful when:

Many request patterns are already configured
You want to review or update a specific pattern
You need to confirm whether a pattern already exists before creating a new one
You want to locate a rule quickly without scanning the full table

Example

You can search for patterns such as:

^POST /ping$
^GET /js/.*$

Only matching request patterns are shown in the table.