InfraRED
March 13, 2007 – 7:40 pmWhen I first stumbled upon InfraRED (http://infrared.sourceforge.net/ I thought it was great, but the more I used it, the more bugs I found. Still, it is an open source tool, so if I was so inclined (or had the ability) I could try to fix the bugs. The original project owners appear to have abandoned the project, however.
The install is a little more complicated than other open-source profilers (e.g. Glassbox ). If you want to take advantage of the DB monitoring, you need to update your application server's JDBC configuration to use the p6spy driver (InfraRED uses another dying or dead open source project, p6spy - http://www.p6spy.com/) , for DB profiling). Once you've done that, you may find (as I did) that it double counts every SQL call. In my case, it could be a result of the extra Hibernate layer used for data access, but I never found the root cause.
What I liked about InfraRED was that it was to create my own AspectJ aspects to instrument my application and have the results reported in the InfraRED web application.
The bottom line: there aren't a lot of good open-source J2EE profilers out there. This could have been one of them, but since development seems to have stopped, Glassbox is a better alternative.