Using the Activity Trace Viewer 

Use

The Single Activity Trace (SAT) is used to track a single activity running over multiple components (Cross Component Trace). If there are performance problems, the SAT is used to analyze a component in detail. To allow for single activity tracing, a component must be instrumented with JARM. The JARM data for each request and component can be viewed in the Java System Reports plug-in.

The J2EE Engine is instrumented with JARM, therefore even if you want to trace an application that is not instrumented with JARM, you still can use the JARM Viewer to browse the JARM data generated by some of the J2EE Engine components that can be related to the traced application.

Using the JARM implementation, you can analyze a single (user's) request to find performance problems in an application, or to understand the logical processing steps inside an application.

Procedure

The Activity Trace Viewer provides two options for viewing SATs:

·        Selected Activity Trace – displays the SAT that is generated for the application you are currently tracing with the Activity Trace, that is, the DSR session filter is applied and only the messages related to this DSR session are displayed.

·        General SAT View – lists the whole SAT file that is generated by the selected system. You can use the dropdown menu next to this option to specify the cluster node whose SAT file you want to view. This option is useful if the J2EE system is down and no activities have been generated for the traced application.

The procedure for working with SAT is the same in either of the above two options, therefore the procedure below focuses only on the Selected Activity Trace option.

...

       1.      Choose Selected Activity Trace.

The traces related to the application that is currently being traced are listed in the panes below.

       2.      In the Requests pane you can see the most important requests selected by different criteria, such as the gross time or the CPU time needed to execute the request. The gross time shows the time it has taken the system to execute it. The biggest gross time gives an indication of where a performance analysis may be necessary.

Choose one of the requests to display detailed information in the Components For Request pane below.

       3.      In the Components For Request pane you can see the data that was collected for the components related to the selected request in a condensed way. The data can be sorted by average gross time, outbound data, or average net time. The net time shows the slowest components (net time means the time a thread stays in a component, without the time left in subcomponents). The levels show how deep a component is nested (0 = the highest level).

       4.      Choose To Activities Overview to go back to the Activity Trace page.