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.