Glassbox
March 18, 2007 – 8:40 amGlassbox - http://www.glassbox.com/ - looks promising. It's open source and easy to install.
From the glassbox.com website:
Glassbox is a valuable complement to load testing tools. When you drive load through the app, Glassbox will automatically pinpoint bottlenecks and report their complete stack traces. That means developers will see exactly where the problem lies, without having to recreate the conditions of your test.
Because Glassbox is designed to look for specific problems rather than to collect profiling data for human analysis, it introduces negligible performance overhead. It can even be used in production apps.
Glassbox uses AspectJ to instrument your application and report on the "hotsposts" or methods that are slow. It also will report any Java Exceptions that are thrown. Best of all, it uses MBeans so you can use JMX for management and to access the collected data.
Version 2.0 is in Beta right now, and I encourage everyone to try it out. The install is easy - a simple war deployment and update to your startup scripts and you are running.
A couple drawbacks: Glassbox did not pick up all of the requests to my JSF application. It's a known issue, and hopefully the great developers at Glassbox will come up with a fix soon. Also, it doesn't look like there is a way customize the AOP aspects used.
Overall, I think it has great potential, I just worry about continued development, as it appears like other tools with potential seem to have lost developer support (see InfraRED and p6spy)