An article by Nils Ehmke (nils AT rhocas.de)
I think the original idea from Kieker was quite simple: put some monitoring probes into your application, add a properties file, and start the monitored application. After some time (or maybe after the application was stopped), you would collect the data and analyze it. Although this might be enough for some applications, this is not flexible enough for an enterprise business application. Such applications often have a different lifecycle compared to desktop applications, as they can not simply be restarted at any given time. In such scenarios one should be able to enable/disable the monitoring and even change the configuration, without the need to start and stop the whole application. Unfortunately, it is not possible to change the configuration of a started monitoring controller in Kieker. And the monitoring controller follows the singleton pattern, so we can’t do anything … or can we?