NovaTec takes a look at Kieker

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Stefan Siegl and Ivan Senic of NovaTec decided to take a close look at the Kieker Monitoring framework and published a short article on their findings:

Analysing Kieker with JBoss DVDStore sample application
[…]
Together with my collegue Ivan Senic we thought we give it a try.
[…]
We chose to use the DVD store sample application that ships with JBoss 5.1 to test Kieker.
[…]

Conclusion
Kieker Monitoring is a monitoring framework that provides – out-of-the-box – offline analysis functionality for the application monitoring. We think that these features are especially useful for architecture and infrastructure detection.
[…]

Head over to the NovaTec Blog for the full article.

Kieker 1.7 released

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Today, we released version 1.7 of our Kieker framework for application performance monitoring and dynamic software analysis: https://kieker-monitoring.net/

  • Major changes
    • Adaptive monitoring: extended set of (de)activation patterns to support adaptive monitoring for custom probes. Before: limited to (de)activate monitoring for operation signature patterns.
    • New file system writers supporting (ZIP) compression
    • Minor modifications to the Kieker.Analysis API:
      1. Removed the `register` methods. Registration now implicit by passing context information to the plugin constructors. A legacy mode for the previous API is included in this version.
      2. Analysis projects can now have properties available to the plugins.
    • Bug fixes and improvements to code, tests, documentation, examples
    • Various improvements to the WebGUI (see separate `HISTORY` file)
  • Infrastructure:
    • Kieker releases now also published via Maven Central Repository (http://search.maven.org/)
    • Completely redesigned web site: https://kieker-monitoring.net
    • Live demo at http://demo.kieker-monitoring.net

Eclipse IDE Plug-In

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Kieker provides an Eclipse-Plugin for monitoring and analyzing Java projects from within the Eclipse IDE.
The monitoring part allows to instrument and run Java-projects within Eclipse.
The analysis part allows to process a Kieker log folder by a user-defined Kieker analysis.

Kieker Trace Analysis Tool with GUI

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Kieker’s Trace Analysis Tool allows to reconstruct and visualize architectural representations of the monitored systems from trace information collected at runtime. Currently supported architectural representations include

  • Software architectural diagrams
    • Sequence diagrams
    • Call trees (single traces, aggregation of trace sets)
    • Dependency graphs (container-, component-, and operation-level)
  • HTML output of the reconstructed system model
  • Textual trace and trace equivalence representations
    • Execution traces
    • Message traces

Diagrams can be exported into pixel and vector graphic formats (PDF, SVG, PNG, etc.).

The TraceAnalysisTool can be used via a command line interface and a dialog-based GUI.

Kieker Trace Diagnosis

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The Kieker Trace Diagnosis is a JavaFX-based GUI which allows the user to analyze and interact with recorded traces.
It reads in the desired monitoring log, analyzes it, and finally visualizes it as filterable and sortable tables and tree views.
The provided views show operation calls, such as method invocations and SQL queries, (including type name, operation name, execution time etc.) and traces both aggregated and in detail.

Offline and live analysis

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There are two different ways to start a Kieker analysis. The first is to run and to monitor the software and afterwards to start the analysis. Alternatively, it is possible to run the monitoring and the analysis simultaneous.

Predefined and customizable filters

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Kieker provides several predefined and customizable filters to build you own analysis.
For example, it offers filters for trace analysis, anomaly detection, and architecture discovery.
Moreover, Kieker provides filters for associated visualizations such as call graphs and dependency graphs.
Finally, it offers the ability to define your own filter to adjust your custom analysis.

Predefined and custom analysis

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It is easily possible to run a predefined analysis or to build a custom analysis for your own specific use case.
For example, Kieker provides the following predefined analyses:

  • trace reconstruction and visualization
  • anomaly detection
  • architecture discovery and visualization

Since A Kieker analysis follows the pipe-and-filter architectural style, it is therefore easy to build your own analysis based on parts of predefined analyses.

Dynamic and adaptive monitoring

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By default, instrumentation is static. This means, at runtime, once a method or resource is instrumented, the instrumentation cannot be removed, and if a method/resource is not instrumented, it cannot be instrumented.

Kieker includes functionality to change the instrumentation at runtime, which is denoted as dynamic instrumentation. Currently, the dynamic instrumentation can be configured via JMX and periodically polled configuration files. In this way, the monitoring can be enabled/disabled in parts or completely at runtime.

Dynamic instrumentation is a prerequisite for adaptive monitoring, which aims to plan and to execute the monitoring at runtime. This allows, for instance, to make the instrumentation more detailed when a performance problem should be analyzed.