Golan Shem-Tov here with the Solutions Architects team at Quest.
With Foglight 5.2.4.5 java cartridge Quest added some important new features to the Java monitoring and tracing capabilities that are very useful in trying to locate a root cause of an application performance problem.
1. Tier Breakdown graph - In the java requests page there is a graph showing the time that is spent between the different java component types.
This graph gives you the ability to see where in general your application is spending most of the time without the need to start tracing. Out of the box you can see standard J2ee components (ejb, servlets, struts, JDBC and others) but you can also define custom components. Custom components can be packages, classes and even specific methods in a set of classes, for example in this case we defined the method “execute” as a custom component in instrumentation.config and were able to see it in the tier breakdown.
"TestComp": MethodList (
include "com.bea.medrec.actions.BaseLookupDispatchAction.execute",
),
2. Another nice feature in the Java cartridge is the ability to collect traces according to a specific criteria, one can collect traces that are over/under certain response time, ending in exceptional exits or incomplete. This feature helps get to root cause of specific problems as the traces that are kept are only ones that demonstrate a problem.
3. The singe trace viewer itself was also modified; you can search for a specific node and choose between a tree view and a list view. A tree view may be clearer when tracking the flow of a request through the different methods.
A list view on the other hand makes it easier to immediately see the 1st, 2nd and 3rd most expensive methods in your request call tree.
In both views the ability to export the information as pdf, and as csv in the case of a list makes it easy to share this information with others in the team.
The information view about the method that is causing the problem was also enhanced and now also includes the message of the exception that was thrown for that method.
I hope you find this article useful when using Foglight Java cartridge to manage your applications.
Golan Shem-Tov