Tuesday, November 13, 2018

How to monitor Java services - performance, errors and much more

In the real world, a lot of mission critical business logic lives in background services. Buying something from an e-commerce site, such as Amazon, initiates a variety of tasks that must be completed after clicking to confirm your request. Monitoring the performance of your web applications is only part of the puzzle if you want to proactively ensure that your software is working correctly all the time.

If you want to make sure that your software is working properly, you should monitor your Java services that deal with these mission critical tasks in the background.

Why monitoring a Java service is different

Monitoring of Java Services is different from monitoring of Java web applications. Web applications have very defined "transactions" based on each Web request that is running in the application container. It is very simple that services such as the Retrace identify each request of the individual Web and accompany the performance of them.

Java services are not started or defined for the work they perform. They usually start and run continuously until the server shuts down. To properly monitor the performance of your Java services, you must define the start and end of the transactions or the operations that are executed.

Identifying "Operations" in your Java services

Java services generally follow several commonly used standards. By identifying these patterns, you can quickly assess the best way to identify operations in your code.

Think of an operation as a small unit of work that is repeated several times. You need to identify which of them you want to monitor in your code.

Common standards of use:

• Queue listener: the application listens continuously in a queue and each message captured in a queue would be an exclusive operation.

• Timer-based - Many Java services use timers to repeat a specific operation at intervals of a few seconds, such as searching a database.

• Job scheduler: it is possible to incorporate a task scheduler such as Quartz in your Java service to trigger small jobs and scale them on all servers.

Most Java services will probably execute several operations. I would suggest dividing them into the smallest logical units of work. It is better if you supervise smaller work units. This is similar to monitoring each web application in your web application compared to monitoring the performance of the web application in its entirety.

For example, our monitoring agent for Linux is a Java service. He makes a ton of different operations on a schedule every few seconds. Each of these tasks that you execute must be defined as exclusive operations so that you can follow everything you do.


How to Instrument “Operations” in Your Code for Retrace

After identifying the operations you want to accompany, you will need to make some smaller code annotations to define your operations. This is done by adding the dependency of the Stackify Java APM annotations to the pom.xml file of your project.

 

<dependency>
   <groupId>com.stackify</groupId>
   <artifactId>stackify-java-apm-annot</artifactId>
   <version>1.0.4</version>
</dependency>
Example of instrumenting your code for Retrace:
import com.stackify.apm.Trace;
 
@Trace
public class ClassToBeInstrumented
{
            @Trace(start = true)
            public void methodToStartNewTrace()
            {
                        ...
            }
}

How to install Retrace for Java Services

The Retrace uses the lightweight Java profile and other data collection techniques. A service is installed on your Linux server and runs in the background. Our agent is easily installed by means of a curl or wget command. Please, check our documents for complete instructions.

Retrace provides developers with many advantages for monitoring Java service performance. Retrace provides holistic monitoring of Java service performance, including code profile, errors, logs, metrics and much more.

Benefits of monitoring Java services with Retrace

Once your code has been instrumented and the Retrace is collecting data about your Java service, you can get some incredible details about what your code is doing. Retrace can monitor independent Java applications executed through various service managers.

Retrace automatically supports dependencies and the most common Java frameworks, without code changes. You can instantly see how they are used in your application and how they affect performance. This includes PostgreSQL, MySQL, Oracle, external web services, MongoDB, Elasticsearch, Redis, Quartz, Hibernate and much more.

Identifying the main operations

Retrace allows you to see all the operations that are running in your Java service. Quickly identify the frequency with which each of them runs, the average time of execution and much more. The performance of Java services is typically a "black box." Retrace allows you to understand exactly what your Java service is doing.

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Tracking Top SQL Queries

Retrace automatically crawls all SQL queries executed by your code. This includes stored procedures, dynamic SQL, Hibernate queries with crazy appearance and much more. Quickly identify which queries are running, how long they take and how often they are being called.

View Application Exceptions & Logs

Because Retrace works through the Java light code profile, it also has the ability to collect untreated exceptions by being thrown by its code. You can also track exceptions that are recorded in your registration structure.

Retrace provides powerful functions for error monitoring and record management. You can send all your records to the Retrace via log4j, logback and others. With Retrace, you can search all your records in a single location and perform many other advanced records management features.

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Tracking Custom Application Metrics

Retrace automatically monitors the use of the CPU and the memory of your Java service. You can also use it to track many other JMX standard MBeans. Including statistics on garbage collection and exceptions are counted per second. Retrace can also monitor custom JMX mBeans created by your applications.

The custom metrics are also compatible with the use of Stackify's maven "stackify-metric" package. With just a few lines of code, you can accompany how often or for a long time your Java service does practically anything.

View Code Level Traces

One of the most powerful features of Retrace are the snapshots of the level of code that it collects. For any of the operations tracked for your Java service, you can see all the main methods, dependencies that are called, exceptions, records and much more in context.

Summary

The developers depend a lot on Java services to do a great job of mission critical. Monitoring Java services is essential to ensure that they are functioning correctly and with good performance.


Retrace is an excellent solution to monitor the performance of your Java services. For more information, see our product page on Retrace and our overview of application tracking.

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