Using Glassbox to Monitor Spring Application Performance

In this session you will learn how the Glassbox open source troubleshooting and monitoring agent supports low overhead management and troubleshooting without needing to "bake in" instrumentation up front. Glassbox provides an automated installer and discovers common application components, such as Spring MVC controllers. It then reports on application performance and failures with an easy to use AJAX interface that gives concise summaries of common problems such as database failures, and slow operations caused by thread contention and excessive distributed calls. Glassbox also supports customization and detailed analysis for deeper investigation.

Under the covers, Glassbox uses JMX and aspect-oriented programming to discover applications, track performance, and automatically diagnose common problems in Java applications. You will see how Glassbox can be extended easily with XML, AspectJ, and Spring AOP, providing a solid foundation for customized application monitoring. Glassbox is deployed using AspectJ load-time weaving and is built and configured using Spring so it is an interesting example of using Spring. We look at some best practices for working with AspectJ load-time weaving to achieve the best performance and avoid issues. See also http://www.glassbox.com/ for more information.

About Ron Bodkin

Ron Bodkin is the chief software architect of Quantcast, an open ratings service for Web sites. Ron is also the founder of New Aspects of Software, which provides consulting and training on aspect-oriented software development and effective architectures for Java. Ron is also the leader of the open source Glassbox application performance troubleshooting project.

Previously, Ron led the first implementation projects and training efforts for customers of the AspectJ group at Xerox PARC. Prior to that, Ron was a founder and the CTO of C-bridge, a consultancy that delivered enterprise applications using Java frameworks.

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