ABOUT ADAPTIVE INSTRUMENTATION

    Adaptive instrumentation is a patent pending technology that automatically discovers and isolates the major contributors to poor performance in J2EE applications while minimizing overhead.

    This paper reviews the traditional approach to monitoring J2EE applications, lists problems associated with this approach and explains how Adaptive Instrumentation resolves these problems. A glossary of basic terms used throughout this document is included in Appendix A.

WHY ADAPTIVE INSTRUMENTATION?

    Measuring and isolating performance bottlenecks in production Java 2 Platform Enterprise Edition (J2EE) applications requires an efficient data collection technology that provides detailed performance metrics with minimal overhead. Excessive overhead is usually the result of over-monitoring; therefore, deciding what components of the application should be monitored is a key issue. Traditionally, this has been a manual trial and error process where the application structure is examined and components that could potentially cause a bottleneck are added to the list of monitored components. If undetermined performance issues still exist after all components on the list are monitored, a manual analysis process needs to be employed until the root cause of the remaining performance problems is found. During this process, if too many components are monitored, the associated overhead will affect the system and some components will have to be removed from the list of monitored components to maintain reasonable overhead.

    This process is tedious, time-consuming and requires a significant amount of developer experience. It is typically repeated during application testing as well as after the application is deployed in production since the test environment is often different from the target production environment.

    Also, changes in an application’s Java code, workload patterns and database behavior frequently introduce new performance problems. Any of these changes will require additional manual refinement to the process described above.

    The question is: How can we improve this process? The answer is Adaptive Instrumentation.