Glassbox 2.0 Beta is here and ready for free download
- Open Source Glassbox 2.0 will replace the Glassbox Inspector
- Simple Web Based Client (see it in our user guide)
- Drop in the Glassbox webapp and it automatically troubleshoots your other Java Apps
Glassbox Inspector is still available, just scroll down for the latest version, but it is in the process of getting merged into the Open Source Glassbox 2.0 project. Glassbox 2.0 is also free, we encourage you to see if that might fit your needs.
Inspector Description
Glassbox Inspector is an open source project which delivers performance monitoring
for J2EE applications using AspectJ and JMX.
The Glassbox Inspector project makes it much easier to troubleshoot enterprise Java applications in production.
Latest Inspector Downloads
Don't forget to visit our user forums to learn more or ask questions.
Screenshot
Here is a screenshot of using the Java 5 JConsole to monitor the Spring Petclinic and Dukes Bookstore sample applications running in Tomcat 5.5 on a JRockIt 1.5.0_02 JVM.
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Glassbox Inspector Screenshot Click diagram or enlarge here.
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Background
The Glassbox Inspector is the foundation of a next generation approach to troubleshooting
performance and reliability problems in enterprise Java. It leverages the capabilities of AspectJ, JMX,
and Java 5 management to provide correlated data about enterprise applications running in production.
It is sponsored by the Glassbox Corporation
Project Summary
The Glassbox Inspector project combines AspectJ and JMX for a flexible, modular approach to monitoring
performance for enterprise systems. It provides correlated information to allow you to identify specific
problems, but with low enough overhead to be used in production environments. It lets you capture
statistics such as total counts, total time, and worst-case performance for requests, and will also let
you drill down into that information for database calls within a request.
Participation
We'd love for you to download the Glassbox Inspector and give us feedback, or suggest areas where you would
like to contribute.
You can visit our user forums for any discussion or questions. And you can always reach us at [contact AT
glassbox DOT com]. And we'd love you to join the project mailing lists: users@glassbox-inspector.dev.java.net
for users, and if you are interested in contributing as a developer dev@glassbox-inspector.dev.java.net.
New developers are encouraged to send emails to this list to discuss areas you'd like to contribute in
and ask questions. Starting small is usually a good idea.
Future Directions
Some of the many exciting future directions to expand the project include:
- Capturing more context about what is happening (e.g., stack traces and parameters), especially for unusual results (failures or abnormal response times)
- Monitoring top-level resource information (for example, total time spent calling services or connecting to databases). This could be provided with better summary data.
- Monitoring more operations, resources such as JMS and EJB, and expanding coverage for CPU-intensive components such as XML processing
- Handling distributed monitoring, to track information across clustered applications and to correlate information across distributed calls.
- Using Java 5 management information such as CPU times or thread-specific statistics.
- Using application server JMX statistics, such as thread pools.
- Capturing history and trends, with persistent storage and reports
- Using JMX to provide alerts and exposing statistical summaries. It would be very nice to roll-up key information about nested monitors in the JMX statistics.
- Adaptively discovering relevant parameters to track (for example, for unknown database queries or Servlet requests).
- Providing resource monitoring for higher-level database and service access frameworks (like Hibernate, TopLink, EJB 3 Persistence Managers, JAX-WS, etc.).
- Allowing sampling to vary the amount of data captured
- Monitoring system events, such as 404 errors for requests to an Web application that aren’t bound to a Servlet
- Providing different degrees of statistical summarization (for example, histograms of times spent in a request).
- Monitoring business events, such as customer purchases or abandoned shopping carts
Complete Inspector Downloads
Don't forget to visit our user forums to learn more or ask questions.
