Geoff Vona

Despite the increasingly widespread adoption of J2EE for enterprise applications, measuring their performance in production continues to be a black art. Without knowing what to look for, many people measure anything that seems useful, which soon results in an overloaded system and reams of meaningless metrics data. It's tempting to just throw xup your hands and start making system changes based mainly on hunches. This article provides a strategy for measuring performance in production. Starting with an explanation of some basic metrics that express the performance of a J2EE application, we'll apply these to a model of a J2EE system, showing how these metrics interact in different areas of the system. From here we will drill-down to discuss the nuts and bolts of gathering metrics from each type of J2EE component, from the client Web browser through to the back-end ... (more)