PerformanceEngineer.com software performance engineering & testing

dynaTrace is a new company and tool that offers a robust java profiling solution that is actually easy to use and install.

One of the great features of Java 5 (see: Pro Java 5 ) is Aspect technology. Here, I'll show you how you can use custom Aspects to instrument your application and monitor using AspectJ and Jamon.

The WebLogic Diagnostic Framework, while powerful, is not the easiest beast to work with. After a couple of days of messing around with it, I finally figured out how to instrument my application code's methods.

Dynamic Tracing (DTrace) is a debugging tool introduced in the Solaris 10 Operating System to help debug systemic problems that are difficult to diagnose using traditional debugging tools and mechanisms. This tool
takes advantage of points of instrumentation in the Solaris OS to present information useful for debugging errors and investigating performance issues in applications running on the Solaris OS.

Glassbox - 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.

It's not as straightforward as you might think or expect, but once setup, gives a lot more insight into the behavior of your applications. Use your favorite JMX client (jconsole, jManage, SiteScope, MC4J, etc.) to monitor thread pools, database connections, memory usage and any other MBean attributes.

There are two ways (that I know of) to enable a WebLogic application for monitoring using JMX.

• Enable IIOP and default user for the WebLogic server
• Use the Java 5 JMX remote capabilities