Abstract: A system monitors a network or web application provided by one or more distributed applications and provides data for each and every method instance in an efficient low-cost manner. Agents may monitor the performance of the distributed application by the web services and report monitoring data as runtime data to the remote server, for example a controller. The controller may analyze the data to identify one or more performance issues or “hot spot” methods based on current or past performance, functionality, content, or business relevancy. Instructions and/or configuration information may be transmitted by the controller to the agents that correspond to a particular business transaction portion associated with a hot spot. The portions are then monitored to collect data associated with the hot spot and the hot spot data is reported back to the controller.

Abstract: Asynchronous handoffs between threads and other software components may be automatically detected, and the corresponding working objects may be tracked. The system may report monitoring information for an overall transaction that includes the original request and corresponding asynchronous requests. Automatically detecting asynchronous requests may include instrumenting a virtual machine, such as a Java Virtual Machine (JVM), to detect the creation of thread handoff objects and the object and/or thread execution. Thread handoff objects may automatically tracked, tracked based on data learned over time, tracked based on user input, and otherwise configured. In some embodiments, after detecting the creation of a thread handoff object, an identification of the object of the call may be identified as being tracked in another server or application.

Abstract: A mechanism is provided for customizing communication of correlation data between servers using a custom or proprietary communication protocol. The system may modify a payload transmitted between servers to include monitoring parameters. The payload may be modified by expanding a portion of the payload or otherwise inserting data into the payload. The portion may include a header, footer, an additional property, a field, or other portion of the header. A mechanism may detect both outgoing calls and incoming requests to either modify the request with the payload or retrieve the payload from the request. The configuration preferences received from a user may be used to process the detected calls and modify a payload at a designed portion suitable to be expanded. Once sent, the configuration parameters may be used by a recipient server to detect the request with the modified payload and retrieve the monitoring parameter.

Abstract: A system monitors a client request and a backend business transaction performed in response to the request and correlates the data generated from monitoring the request and business transaction. A request may be monitored in detail to determine several metrics. The metrics may include sever connection time, response receipt completion time, document download time, document processing time, and page rendering time. The metrics may be determined for an entire content page as well as individual page elements, such as Iframes and elements constructed from AJAX techniques.