Java Enterprise Best Practices

Use Monitoring Tools

Monitoring tools continually measure activity and produce logs that can be analyzed for trends or problems. Your choice of monitoring tools should be guided by three primary requirements:

• The tool should have a low overhead cost for collecting data from the server.

• The tool should provide measurements that are important for your project.

• The tool should be suitable for monitoring in both the development environment and the production environment.

Enterprise monitoring tools provide valuable information for both development performance tuning and production performance monitoring. Ideally, to ensure the success of performance monitoring in production, the skills and knowledge acquired in development should be transferred to the production environment with a minimum of disruption.

Second, monitoring tools should also do the following:

• Scale with the application

• Be easy to configure

• Provide detailed analysis tools

• Provide automatic advisements or warnings whenever possible

A number of commercial J2EE performance-monitoring tools are now available. These tools improve J2EE performance-tuning productivity significantly, and it is worth obtaining one for your project. (A list of such tools can be obtained at http://www.JavaPerformanceTuning.com/resources.shtml). If you want to implement your own tool, you need to add logging to all the main communications interfaces of the application, the transaction and session boundaries, and the lifecycle boundaries (for instance, the ...