Business Transaction Monitoring
A recent Gartner survey of enterprises indicated that user experience was the most important criteria when formulating application performance strategy. When user experience is reported as poor, discovering the cause of slow application transactions is paramount. But in today’s multi-tier, heterogeneous application architectures, it is challenging to determine what is causing a slowdown: is it the network, or the client, or the database query, or application processing, or an external web service call, etc.?
Monitoring of business transactions provides clear visibility into which application tier is slowing down user access to applications and, in turn, affecting user experience.
Challenges
Java application architectures have evolved to include several hardware and software tiers. Production applications involve multiple load balanced web servers, several tiers of Java application servers and middleware, backend databases, messaging servers, transaction processing engines and external services. And, many of these tiers are inter-dependent. Therefore, it can be extremely challenging to diagnose which tier is causing the transaction to be slow and why. IT operations and DevOps teams need answers to key questions, including:
- Which application tier is causing slowness?
- Is there a code-level issue and if so, what line of code, in what method?
- Are there any calls to remote services slowing down the transaction?
Total Performance Visibility into Java Transaction Processing with eG Enterprise
eG Enterprise provides complete visibility into Java transaction processing in every tier that supports the application. Using byte code instrumentation, eG Enterprise tags every transaction and traces it through the presentation tier, business logic tier and data tier. Method invocations, processing times and any exceptions are captured in the Java tiers, and any calls to non-Java tiers and external services are also tracked. For database accesses, the queries executed and the execution times are reported.
- Metrics collected from all the different tiers are combined to present a holistic view depicting the entire transaction flow graph
- IT admins, DevOps admins and application architects can easily isolate the tier responsible for causing high transaction response time
- Issues in the application server and within custom application code can be easily identified
Features
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Visualize Runtime Architecture of Java Application
- Using an advanced tag-and-follow approach, eG Enterprise learns all the different application tiers that a transaction passes through, and constructs the transaction flow path
- Intuitive visual maps show the application runtime path for each request and the processing time spent at each tier
- IT administrators and developers can easily and quickly pinpoint the root cause of transaction slowdowns in real time
- Java business transaction monitoring using eG Enterprise is simple to deploy and non-intrusive. It does not require any special database access privileges, application topology configuration, or any code changes to trace transactions
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Deep Dive into Application Code-Level Issues
eG Enterprise allows you to easily analyze transactions by breaking down request processing time hop by hop, as the transaction flows through each application tier. With this information, you can:
- Isolate problematic Java code that is causing errors or exceptions
- Identify methods that are responsible for high request processing time
- Drill down to the specific database query that is responsible for database slowness
- Track down specific HTTP, JMS or web services calls that are slow
- Quantify enterprise application responsiveness by tracking calls to SAP JCO, Jolt and other application APIs
- Monitor transactions from both web browsers and native mobile applications
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In-Depth Monitoring of JVMs and Java Containers
For situations where Java application slowness is caused by bottlenecks in the Java container or JVM layers, eG Enterprise provides in-depth monitoring for most popular Java containers (Tomcat, WebLogic, JBoss EAP, WildFly, WebSphere, Glassfish, etc.) and JVMs (Oracle, Sun, JRockit, etc.). Using these insights, you can:
- Correlate transaction slowdowns with performance issues in the application server
- Diagnose memory leaks and out-of-memory exceptions
- Optimize the heap and non-heap memory usage of a JVM
- Measure CPU utilization of JVM and identify high CPU threads
- Detect blocked and deadlocked threads
- View the stack trace to find the exact line of code causing issues
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Automated Root Cause Diagnosis
Because user experience can be impacted by many factors outside of application performance, eG Enterprise goes far beyond identifying code level issues alone. Its universal monitoring technology provides visibility into every layer and every tier of the infrastructure that the Java application depends on.
A patented, virtualization-aware, root-cause diagnosis technology automatically discovers inter-dependencies between infrastructure tiers, correlates performance data across these tiers, and pinpoints the exact cause of issues. This eliminates guesswork and finger-pointing and enables IT operations teams, DevOps teams and developers to see exactly where the problem lies and where its effects are.
Supported Platforms and Technologies
| Java Component | |
Supported Platforms & Technologies |
|---|---|---|
| Java Runtime Environments | Java 1.5, Java 1.6, Java 1.7, Java 1.8, Java 9, Java 10, Java 11 (both 32-bit and 64-bit) | |
| JVM Vendors | Oracle/Sun JVM (hotspot), IBM JVM, OpenJDK, Azul Zulu, Zing, SAP JDK | |
| Application Containers | Apache Tomcat, JBoss EAP, JBoss AS, WildFly, Oracle WebLogic, IBM WebSphere, Spring Boot, Jetty | |
| Web Frameworks | JSP, JSF, Servlets, Spring MVC, Apache Struts | |
| Middleware Components | Java EE (EJB, JMS Queue & Topic, RMI, JDBC, JavaMail, LDAP, JPA, Jolt, SAP JCO), Spring Application Framework | |
| Web Services Protocols | HTTP, SOAP, JAX-WS, JAX-RS, RESTful services | |
| Web Services Implementations | Apache Axis, Apache CXF, Jersey, Spring WS, Spring RS | |
| Data Access Framework Implementations | OpenJPA, Hibernate, iBATIS, Spring Data | |
| Messaging Middleware | Apache ActiveMQ, JBossMQ (HornetQ), WebLogic JMS, IBM MQ | |
| Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) | Mule ESB | |
| Databases Supported | Oracle, Oracle RAC, SQL Server, MySQL, IBM DB2, IBM Informix, Postgres, MariaDB, HSQLDB | |
| NoSQL / Cache | MongoDB, Redis, Ehcache | |
| Async and External Programs | Runtime.exec() | |
| Enterprise Applications | JD Edwards EnterpriseOne, SAP NetWeaver, Oracle PeopleSoft | |
| Digital Experience / Content Management platforms | Liferay, Atlassian Confluence | |
| Search Engine | Elasticsearch | |
| E-Commerce suite | SAP Hybris |
Benefits
- Ensure great user experience and peak performance of applications running on Java
- Increase agility in responding to performance issues with deep diagnostics and actionable insights
- Reduce service-level impact by monitoring real-time business transactions with cross-JVM visibility
- Code performance optimization: Pinpoint complex Java problems and code latency in seconds
- Cost-efficient licensing: Benefit from per-server licensing (as opposed to expensive per-JVM licensing). Monitor any number of JVMs on a single server with an affordable per-server license model.
Why eG? One Monitor to Manage All of IT.
- eG Enterprise is the only single pane-of-glass, virtualization-aware, auto-diagnostic IT infrastructure performance monitor
- Gain actionable answers to performance issues, wherever they originate, from application code to bare metal
- Understand the impact of infrastructure issues on application performance and user experience
- Unify IT performance monitoring, alerting, diagnosing, reporting, and capacity planning in a single console
- Ensure a great user experience and dramatically improve IT efficiency
- Benefit from flexible deployment options (on-premises and SaaS) and IT monitoring approaches (agentless and agent-based)