Performance Should Be Free

Performance Should Be FREE! Version 2!

Today I hope to add another free tool to your utility belt. To help you resolve your bottlenecks in production faster than before.

AppDynamics Lite version 2. This free profiler/monitor uses your “Business Logic” to visualize the performance problems.  Discover why your search- of checkout-“transaction” is slow.

Once you installed AppDynamics will automatically start detecting your business transactions. If something spikes your interest, you can right click the transaction and ask it to collect samples aka snapshot. These snapshots contain stack traces with method execution times. For example.

com.sample.domain.Cart.checkout(300 ms)

Also external calls, like webservices and SQL statements are collected.

New in version 2, is the trending of MBeans through JMX. This might not get you excited, but you can also add alerting, so receive a mail if a monitored value goes above certain base line.

Now you know if something is going wrong and you can take snapshots (manually) while it’s happening.

Pro’s

•          Easy to install
•           Easy to use
•           Easy to understand
•      Overhead < 2%

Con’s

•           It’s limited: Max data retention of 2 hours
•           Only 30 transactions
•           It’s not perfect. Use it as your first line, but also consider using other tools like JVisualVM & MAT.

Upgrade? Why?

-          Less work! Snapshots are taken atomically.

-          Jumping from tier to tier. Business transaction can run over multiple tiers, now you can follow them and find out, which tier is causing the problem.

…

Advice

Try it! It will help you find what you are looking about 80 % of the time.

When your application matures it’s about 90%. (Personal opinion)

Watch the movie!

Install:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xSenA-zEKR0

New version:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uZkHkVlOohM