Abstract: A system and method for tracing individual transactions on method call granularity is disclosed. The system uses instrumentation based transaction tracing mechanisms to enhance thread call stack sampling mechanisms by a) only sampling threads executing monitored transactions while execution is ongoing b) tagging sampled call stacks with a transaction identifier for correlation of sampled call stacks with instrumentation bases tracing data. The combination of instrumentation based tracing with thread call stack sampling reduces sampling generated overhead by only sampling relevant thread, and reduces instrumentation generated overhead because it allows reducing instrumentation.

Abstract: A system and method for tracing individual transactions on method call granularity is disclosed. The system uses instrumentation based transaction tracing mechanisms to enhance thread call stack sampling mechanisms by a) only sampling threads executing monitored transactions while execution is ongoing b) tagging sampled call stacks with a transaction id for correlation of sampled call stacks with instrumentation bases tracing data. The combination of instrumentation based tracing with thread call stack sampling reduces sampling generated overhead by only sampling relevant thread, and reduces instrumentation generated overhead because it allows reducing instrumentation.

Abstract: A method and system for detection of completeness of tracing data describing globally distributed, synchronous and asynchronous transaction in real time is presented. Monitored transactions may be executed on different computers systems, connected via computer networks with different and fluctuating latencies, and timing systems of the computers systems may be subject to different time drifts. The system and method may be implemented by different, multiple collector nodes responsible for collecting and forwarding transaction tracing data to a monitoring node, responsible for correlating transaction tracing data. Collector nodes and monitoring node may reside on different computer systems, which may be connected via computer networks with different and fluctuating latencies, and timing systems of the computers systems may be subject to different time drifts.

Abstract: A monitoring system uses existing tracing data describing individual distributed transactions to determine if a recorded thread communication performed by the monitored transactions is internal to a monitored application or whether the recorded thread communication is an outgoing communication. Thread communications which are sent and received by threads that are monitored by the monitoring system are considered to be internal communications. Thread communications for which only the sending thread is monitored are considered to be outgoing communications. The determination process analyzes client side tracing data of the recorded thread communication and determines whether corresponding server side tracing data is available. If no corresponding server side tracing data is available, the thread communication is considered to be an outgoing communications. Examples of thread communications include HTTP requests, web service calls, and remote method invocations.

Abstract: A system for generic, run-time adaptive placement of byte code instrumentation takes into account object oriented inheritance relationships that are stored in an inheritance repository. The inheritance repository, which mirrors the structure of the monitored application, is created at run-time and is updated if the code base of the monitored application changes either dynamically at run-time or by manually changing the configuration and restarting the application. The inheritance repository contains meta-data of application classes and their relationships, like direct and indirect inheritance. The inheritance repository information is used to evaluate generic instrumentation placement rules, like rules that match to methods of classes that inherit from a specific base class. The inheritance repository is generated concurrently with instrumentation placement at application load-time or run-time and persists between application runs to enable dedicated adaptation runs to create the repository.

Abstract: The present invention provides a method and system for tracing and monitoring of distributed transactions spanning multiple threads or processes, running on multiple host systems, connected by a computer network. The correlation of distributed transactions is based on information that uniquely may identify execution paths within a virtual machine, additional to information which uniquely may identify the virtual machine that processes the execution path. The correlation information is transferred from a monitored thread to threads that are activated by the monitored thread and allows to reconstruct parent-child relations between different threads. Participating threads may run in different processes, in different virtual machines or on different host systems.

Abstract: A method and system for dynamic and adaptive deployment of in-process agents to virtual machine based applications which may run on remote hosts is provided. A bootstrap agent is injected into the application, using standardized interfaces provided by virtual machine based systems like SUN MICROSYSTEMS' JAVA system or MICROSOFT's .NET system. The bootstrap agent establishes a network connection to a management server which provides binaries representing in-process agents in bytecode or native code format. The bootstrap agent sends data identifying its runtime environment to the management server, which determines the matching in-process agent binaries for the runtime environment of the connected agent and sends the selected binaries to the bootstrap agent. The bootstrap agent receives the binaries and installs them to its hosting virtual machine, according to their format (bytecode or native code).

Abstract: The present invention provides a system and method that aggregates and processes monitoring data acquired inside a monitored application outside of the said application to reduce overhead caused by monitoring tasks in the monitored application. Monitoring data acquired by monitoring sensors is stored in a ring buffer after acquisition, which decouples acquisition of data and its transfer, enabling asynchronous sending of performance data to a monitoring server for analysis. Memory consumption of said ring buffer is limited to a fixed size which keeps memory consumption caused by monitoring processes low and predictable. Correlation, analysis, all computation of monitoring data, and bytecode manipulation to place sensors is performed outside of the monitored application, by a monitoring server.