Abstract: Systems and techniques are provided for identifying and tracing an individual session of a web application hosted at a server in a network communication system, based on a request message from a client requesting a function of the web application. Data stored in a database may be accessed by one or more virtual machines executing at the server via one or more data connections from a connection pool allocated to each of the virtual machines. Reference and logging information are stored for each virtual machine and corresponding connection pool, thereby enabling operations performed by each virtual machine for the requested function to be traced with a relatively high degree of granularity at each of various functional layers or tiers of the network communication system.