Monitoring, optimizing, and troubleshooting WebSphere® Application
Server performance can be a challenge. This article gives you a basic
strategy for monitoring with an understanding of the application view.
About this task
This information includes understanding the application flow
that satisfies the end user request. This perspective provides the
views of specific servlets that access specific session beans, entity
container-managed persistence beans, and a specific database. This
perspective is important for the in-depth internal understanding of
who is using specific resources. Typically at this stage, you deploy
some type of trace through the application, or thread analysis under
load condition techniques to isolate areas of the application and
particular interactions with the back-end systems that are especially
slow under load. In this case, WebSphere Application
Server provides request metrics to help trace each individual transaction
as it flows through the application server, recording the response
time at different stages of the transaction flow (for example, request
metrics records the response times for the Web server, the Web container,
the Enterprise JavaBeans container, and the
back-end database). In addition, several IBM® development
and monitoring tools that are based on the request metrics technology
(for example, Tivoli® Monitoring for Transaction Performance)
are available to help view the transaction flow.