Switcheroo: Changing the Kieker Configuration at Runtime

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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?

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Kieker Trace Diagnosis 3.0.0 Released

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We are pleased to anounce, that we released Version 3.0.0 of our Kieker Trace Diagnosis tool on January 23, 2018. As usual, you can download the release from https://github.com/kieker-monitoring/kieker-trace-diagnosis-ui/releases.

Some distinct and selected features:

  • Kieker Trace Diagnosis uses and requires now Java 9.
  • The monitoring log import has been further accelerated.
  • The tool supports now the writing and reading of ASCII monitoring logs.

We also fixed some minor bugs. You can find the full change log in the release archive.

Kieker Trace Diagnosis UI Release

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An article by Nils Ehmke

While the Kieker Monitoring Framework is very suitable for collecting huge amount of monitoring data of your application, the question arises, how these monitoring logs can be analyzed. The tools shipped with Kieker (like the trace analysis tool) can help you only partially, because most of them build upon graph representations which tend to become huge, complex, and incomprehensible for larger applications.

To support the performance analysis of your application, we developed the Kieker Trace Diagnosis tool including a graphical user interface, which we want to introduce in this blog post.

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Instrumentation Record Language (IRL)

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Kieker offers a user-friendly domain specific language called the Instrumentation Record Language (IRL). It is used to define records in a language-independent way. The IRL compiler (as command line or as Eclipse plugin) is then able to generate these records in arbitrary programming languages. Currently, the compiler can produce records in Java, C, and Perl. The compiler is extensible for other languages. Therefore, we provide an API based on OSGI.

abstract event AbstractExampleEntity {
    int id
    string label
}
template TemplateExample {
    boolean templateActive
}

event ExampleEntity extends AbstractEntity : TemplateExample {
   byte byteValue = 2  // default values
   transient short shortValue // value is not serialized
   changeable int intValue // value can be changed in analysis
   auto-increment long longvalue // every read to the value increments the value
   double doubleValue
   float floatValue
   char characterValue
   string stringValue
   boolean boolValue
}

CfP/CfPart: 8th Symposium on Software Performance (SSP 2017) will take place in Karlsruhe

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The 8th Symposium on Software Performance (SSP 2017) will take place in Karlsruhe, Germany on November 9-10, 2017. It will be a joint meeting of the Descartes, Kieker, and Palladio research groups.

In addition to invited talks from practitioners and researchers, we welcome contributions from academic, scientific, or industrial contexts in the field of software performance, including but not limited to approaches employing Descartes, Kieker, and/or Palladio.

We solicit technical papers (maximum 3 pages) and extended abstracts for industry or experience talks (maximum 700 words).

Details are provided on the symposium web site: http://www.performance-symposium.org/

Gunnar Dittrich receives b+m Software + Systems Engineering Award (b+m SSEP)

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During this year’s celebration of Computer Science graduates at Kiel University, Gunnar Dittrich received the b+m Software + Systems Engineering Award (b+m SSEP) for his Master’s thesis “Extraction of User Behavior Profiles for Software Modernization”. The topic builds on the Kieker monitoring framework. Congratulations to Gunnar!

About the award (in German): http://bmiag.de/innovation/technologietransfer/b-m-engineering-preis/