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n e t m o n i t o r i n g
The approach to monitoring complex Java and .NET
applications
In today’s economy, when budgets are strained and IT
Operations must do more with less, IT asks the question
“How do I maintain superior performance of my
applications when I don’t have the time, the resources,
or the money to do so?” In addition, applications are
increasingly complex and difficult to understand. The
level of application complexity is often due to the
constant change of the applications themselves to
maintain the level of functionality the business requires.
Complexity is also due to the physical architecture
of the applications evolving over time—extending,
removing and modifying the multitude of tiers that make
up the applications, ranging from the load balancers all
the way back to the original mainframe components the
applications grew from.
Further complications arise from additive technologies
such as virtualization that create many benefits but
add to the burden of locating and solving applications
performance issues. These hurdles force the IT staff to
rely on tools and technology to manage, monitor and
maintain the performance of their applications. Many
Java and .NET monitoring solutions in the market today
monitor application performance but have difficulties
in dealing with the types of application complexities
discussed above. These monitoring solutions frequently
need to be reconfigured to accept the application
changes and require an “expert” to do so. In addition,
these solutions don’t provide the complete end-to-
end view of the application that is needed because
applications have “grown up” incrementally over time.
This paper will discuss key strategies for monitoring
complex Java and .NET applications to ensure IT
Operations can maintain the level of performance and
availability end users demand.
Understanding application complexities
As applications are moved into production, IT organizations have an
enormous burden on their hands to find tools that offer both the breadth
and depth required to deal with these complex applications.
Depth—Demands an approach based on detailed analysis of Java and
.NET applications. These applications are typically managed today
by multiple application experts to maintain the different components
associated with them. These same application experts are also needed
to understand what transactions are important to the business, so
targeted monitoring can be established. This is problematic for the IT
Operations team, since this type of support is often not delivered so
these “application” resources can be allocated to more strategic projects
for the business. This creates a gap in IT’s ability to identify and solve
application performance issues.
Breadth—Demands an approach based on an end-to-end view of the
complex applications. This type of view is required to understand the
transactional workflow complicated by the myriad of tiers that make
up the application as it has evolved over the years. This need is often
addressed by placing agents on each and every server—an impossible feat
with the number and diversity of technologies in complex applications.
Server agents are required to help support the depth requirements, but
are usually not needed to support the breadth requirement. A balanced,
comprehensive approach to these two dimensions is the best way to
address complex Java and .NET applications.
As these systems have become more complex, user expectations of
performance continue to increase and, correspondingly, the demand for
performance monitoring solutions to manage and monitor all aspects
of the application. To make matters more difficult, IT Operations
continues to have its “silo” experts to monitor and manage these systems
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separate from the development team that produced these complex
applications. This situation demands a set of tools that can allow
collaboration between all the various experts.
Compuware Vantage provides a solution that captures an end-to-end view
of Java and .NET transaction performance analysis as well as providing
deep root-cause analysis in a form that enables IT operations teams to
quickly find and fix problems without having to rely on the application
development team on a day-to-day basis. Vantage Java and .NET
monitoring can offer seamless, quick integration with Vantage End-user
Experience Monitoring and Transaction Profiling to provide a broad and
deep transaction analysis of all applications, for all users, from all locations.
The next sections of this document will explore how Vantage can offer:
• Java and .NET monitoring for deep application analysis and monitoring
• Broad end-to-end application coverage.
Deep application analysis
Building new applications or adding new ones to the business doesn’t
happen as often as enhancing or extending existing applications.
Updates to existing applications require effective tuning to
ensure expected levels of service are being maintained. In order
to understand the application to the depth required to resolve
performance-related issues, a couple of considerations are in order:
• Do you have a complete picture of your applications to effectively
assess performance problems?
• Can you gain visibility into all application tiers to effectively isolate
performance issues?
Vantage identifies poor performance in context of the transaction workflow to better
understand where the bottlenecks reside.
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• Can you trace your user transactions through the application code
to pinpoint bottlenecks?
• Are you able to quickly identify what components of the application
are causing memory leaks?
• Do you have 24x7 monitoring for all transactions to ensure
complete coverage?
• Are you able to effectively define and manage service levels for the
applications the business relies on?
• Can you monitor production applications without impacting their
performance?
• Can IT Operations effectively communicate to the Application team
how to ultimately fix problems?
These questions can be answered in a number of ways by
Compuware’s Vantage Java and .NET monitoring solution.
Complete picture
Many IT organizations only see a piece of the application, which can
make it difficult to identify the performance issues and determine
which application expert to call. Vantage Java and .NET monitoring
provides both a broad and deep analysis into pre-production and
production environments that allow users to pinpoint the exact
locations of code-level performance problems. Vantage technology
delivers a visual landscape of Java and .NET component-based
performance metrics and component interactions, helping IT staff
to quickly tackle performance problems, stabilize poorly performing
applications and align technology with business requirements.
Visibility and traceability

What happens when IT operations struggle to get visibility into all “The trace output not only helps the business to
application tiers and are not able to trace the transaction through understand all the components which affected the
the application code to pinpoint exactly where to tune the code? performance. It gives IT enough information to pinpoint
Vantage enables back-end transaction analysis to deliver visibility
the root cause and take corrective actions.”
for tiers that are beyond the reach of traditional Java and .NET
solutions. This helps address limitations on the ability to instrument ——Dave Patzwald, Vice President of IT,
all the servers, due to cost constraints or the time required to place North American Operating Division
agents on mission-critical servers. Vantage Java and .NET monitoring Schneider Electric
provides transactional tracing which follows and captures individual
transactions down to the method level across different tiers and
technologies to assist root-cause analysis.

Vantage Java and .NET monitoring can follow transactions across

multiple JVMs/CLRs/.NET threads to identify the real bottleneck of
the transaction.

Different methods are traced in different tiers of the application such as Tomcat (first tier), WebSphere (second tier), and JBoss (third tier).
Vantage automatically breaks down the bottleneck to highlight the main reason for the slowdown: Java/.NET code, database activity or
network time.
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Understanding memory leaks
Visibility into application performance sometimes isn’t the problem;
instead, memory can be the issue. Finding memory leaks in Java
or .NET applications can be a daunting task due to not knowing
the exact component causing the memory to crash. Vantage Java
and .NET monitoring quickly identifies Java memory leaks and high
memory allocation sites automatically, allowing IT operations and
development teams to focus on problem resolution.
Vantage identifies potential memory leaks immediately, including the
type and size of the leak and where within the application it occurs,
so that it can be fixed immediately.
Around the clock service-level awareness
Being able to effectively monitor and tune the application is
important. Ensuring service is constantly being maintained is
imperative to successfully managing applications. Vantage Java and
.NET monitoring capabilities add the ability to define service levels
to enable IT staff to effectively monitor methods by CPU, invocations
and response time, gain valuable performance insight into SQL calls,
and also collect key JMX/WMI metrics—right out of the box. In addition,
Vantage can be configured to trigger alarms, such as sending a page
or an e-mail, to alert administrators of degraded performance,
resource starvation, hung transactions, system response-time issues
or the approach of system transaction capacity.
A solution optimized for production
Many Java and .NET monitoring solutions have high overhead
associated with monitoring applications in production environments.
This hinders the ability to perform deep application analysis. In
addition, these solutions gather data using an agent, which causes
the monitoring overhead to increase linearly with application load.
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In order to keep CPU overhead down, Vantage Java/.NET
monitoring utilizes several intelligent profiling techniques to
gather performance metrics without adversely affecting your
application. You don’t need to figure out what portions of your
code to monitor or bring production servers down to make
monitoring changes. Furthermore, Vantage calculates its overhead
at startup, which allots for customization of CPU speed, as well as
memory I/O. Vantage contains automatic internal throttling to ensure
the monitor is optimized for your application’s needs.
Effectively communicate Java and .NET performance
More often than we’d like to admit, relationships between IT
operations and application teams are usually ineffective. Most
organizations lack a tool to assist in communicating identified
issues or problems between “ops” and “apps.” IT is asked to
produce “proof” of issues, resulting in either increased time to
resolve the problems or a complete breakdown of the problem
resolution process. What is needed is a solution that:
• does not rely on the application team’s daily involvement to
identify what and how to monitor the application
• provides sufficient information in a form the application team
can act on to prioritize and resolve identified performance
problems.
These two aspects are important to ensure that efficiency and
effectiveness are optimized for both operations and applications
teams. Many tools do not provide a solution that addresses
both of these aspects, leading ultimately to a breakdown of
communication and cooperation when problems arise. Vantage
Java/.NET monitoring solves both of these problems. First,
Vantage monitors all transactions, thus eliminating operations’
reliance on the application team to identify and maintain the
key set of business transactions that need to be monitored.
Second, Vantage enables operations to effectively communicate
performance issues through several reporting views. Management
or Operational views can drill down to the level of deep analysis.
Some deep analysis reports include node CPU and JVM heap
utilization, the top ten worst-performing methods (ASPs, JSPs,
servlets and EJBs), as well as the top ten worst-performing SQL
calls. These reports can be used to compare releases and ensure
quality control throughout development and QA life cycles.
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Vantage provides views for different audiences to effectively communicate issues. The different views enable drilling on the prioritized
issue, keeping the information in context and isolating the fault domain issues. In addition, users can drill down directly into our deep-dive
analysis tool, which might be a network monitoring tool, Java/.NET monitoring tool, a mainframe tool, or even another vendor’s product.

End-to-end picture of the application

Since applications are architected with many tiers or

sub-systems, it’s important to ensure you have the full
end-to-end picture. Having a clear understanding of your
Java and .NET application performance is important, but
what happens when performance problems are introduced
by other tiers or systems outside the direct path of the
Java/.NET tiers, such as the network, the mainframe, the
databases and any other tier that may not be directly linked
to either the web or application server tier?

Vantage provides visibility into the network contribution of

transaction response times, giving an accurate picture of
the level of service being delivered to real users, not just
the data-center view of the transaction response times.
In addition, Vantage provides 100 percent visibility of all
transactions without pre-knowledge of the application. A
complete view of all transactions avoids the need to know
the application beforehand and helps to address application
Vantage captures and provides the ability to view the end-to-end perspective
changes throughout the application life cycle.
of all tiers for all applications.

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 W H ITE PAPER : v a n t a g e j a v a a n d . n e t m o n i t o r i n g

Vantage correlates key performance metrics with end-user experience to provide a true end-to-end
picture of application performance.

been found, Vantage offers unparalleled reporting capability, both out of

“Where other tools are server-centric, the Compuware
product line is more holistic in nature. Vantage not only looks
at the overall health of the IT infrastructure and different
applications, but also indicates how well individual applications
are performing. Because Vantage can look at the total IT
environment and compile all the different pieces of data into a
single focal point, it gives my staff better direction on where to
find problems. We gained a certain synergy in using Vantage.”
——Steve Adamczyk, WSU Director of Computing Center Services
Wayne State University
There are a couple of important aspects that Vantage captures to provide
immediate visibility into the application:
the box and customized, to facilitate communication with the appropriate
stakeholders.
With insight into end-user experience coupled with visibility into all tiers
of the application, Vantage enables IT teams to collaborate effectively,
prioritize and identify bottlenecks and the impact on the business, as well
as fix the problems.
Superior Application Performance Management solution
Vantage Java/.NET monitoring is the first step to getting started with
application performance management, but you shouldn’t stop there.
Having a complete end-to-end view of the application is necessary.
Vantage is the only solution that provides a comprehensive Application
Performance Monitoring (APM) solution to truly get the most out of
Java and .NET solutions. Otherwise, IT organizations are just adding yet
another silo to their array of existing silos that are not helping effectively
identify and resolve application service delivery issues.

• the network contribution to the end-to-end transaction

• the impact of the problem on the business transaction following for kristen allmacher, IT service management solution
intermittent problems, starting with the end user. marketing manager, COMPUWARE

Vantage Java/.NET monitoring seamlessly integrates with Vantage Kristen has been working in the IT Service Management industry for more
real-user Monitoring and provides full visibility of the root cause of than 10 years in the areas of release and delivery, strategic planning,
end-user transaction performance problems. After the bottlenecks have product management, sales engineering and process improvements.
Kristen has a Six Sigma Green Belt and is ITIL Foundation v3 certified.

Founded in 1973, Compuware provides software, experts and best practices to ensure applications work well and deliver business
value. Our unique approach, Business Service Delivery, helps CIOs optimize end-to-end application performance for leading
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