Why Jennifer?

Why does everyone talk about Jennifer? Out of many Java application monitoring solutions in existence, the reason why Jennifer stands out is because it utilizes its own unique and revolutionary concept. Jennifer, created by the field engineers with years of performance tuning experience, has something that no other solutions have.

1. Real-Time Monitoring

Then how is Jennifer’s real-time monitoring better than that of other solutions? Jennifer is a better solution because it offers real-time data on categories that other solutions do not offer.

Jennifer provides service status, visit users and concurrent user count, throughput, resource status, and other important information in real-time.

One item that really stands out is the real-time active service data. The change in number of active service and its status is very significant. When the number of active services increase, it typically means that the number of service that are processing requests from users have increased; typically this mean that the service response time has become longer, thus more services are need to process the same number of incoming requests, rather than the number of incoming requests have increased. Even if request increases, if the service response speed approaches to 0, the number of active services approaches close to 0, and even if the number of request are low, if the response time is relatively low, the number of active services becomes close the number of concurrent users. As you can see, the active service status is one of important data that can be used to analyze system status.

Jennifer can directly monitor services during its progress instead of monitoring them after they end. In that respect, Jennifer is more effective than other solutions. Important factor in real-time monitoring is its analysis capability. Just because a monitoring solution displays tens or hundreds of monitoring data in real-time doesn’t mean that the user will use the given information correctly or effectively. The data must be organized and presented to the user in a meaningful way and with minimum number of clicks (or time to display the data) for it to be effective. Jennifer dashboard’s Engineer’s View is setup to show all monitoring data needed to directly analyze the web system within 3 mouse clicks. The dashboard can be customized according to customer preference if needed.

2. Response Time Scatter Graph

System performance issue should be analyzed through response time. When monitoring service response time, service profiling must also be monitored. One of the characteristic of Jennifer concerning service response time is that all the service response time is monitored individually. In other competing solutions, response time is typically grouped by service type or time (ex: 30 sec or more).

There are a few reasons why Jennifer monitors service response time individually rather than in groups.

• First, when identical services are executed multiple times, the response time may be delayed for specific transactions only. No matter how the grouping is done, the individual service response time will be diluted if it is averaged out with other services in the group.
• Secondly, there is mapping issue between response time and profiling. If the grouping is done by service name, the mapping would somewhat make sense, but if the mapping is done by business object, the mapping will be too complicated to be used effectively
• Thirdly, Service cannot be classified easily by name. Since service name is determined by the initial request that called it, it does not capture the internal changes that occur during its process. Grouping different services with that has changes dynamically during its process simply because they share the same service name is not very effective way to group the services.

Jennifer’s X-View offers direct and powerful way to monitor performance issue. The ability to see all services’ individual response time and its detail in one view is more effective than using many different views or graphs combined. Resource shortage is shown as delay in response time in X-View, and the plotted dots form patterns depending on the issue at hands thus users can benefit from this view compared to other solutions.

User can also feel the benefit that Jennifer offers in its speed. Tasks that may hours/minutes with other solutions take only minutes/seconds in with Jennifer’s X-View.

3. Enterprise Point of View (User, File,Socket, SQL param etc…) Monitoring Concept

• System Monitoring In enterprise system, tracking the system user related information is important. What is the website visitor count? How many people are using the site currently? What is the concurrent user count and the throughput? These information need to be quantified and analyzed in order to find the system capacity and tune the system to its optimal point of usage. Jennifer is the perfect tool in answering above questions and concerns. Jennifer’s strength lies in that it doesn’t just evaluate above information in java system point of view, but also in enterprise system point of view.
• Transaction Profiling Enterprise information system is different in many aspect compared to PC game or application. The number of user is much greater and the speed or stability of system is important and most of the data processed are Critical to operation. To monitor enterprise system, the focus must not the service transaction flow instead of the website code. Jennifer puts its monitoring focus on file, socket, SQL, and others instead of the site code.

4. Easy & Powerful

• EASY
  Monitoring solution must be easy to use. This point obviously applies to all types of software, but it is especially important for monitoring solutions. Because system administrator must have expert knowledge on many different S/W and H/W, spending additional time learning to use a monitoring solution is not realistic. Jennifer is a tool designed to be used by both administrator and developer, and it is currently being used by both party. Even a notice user can learn to use Jennifer with just a few minutes of instruction.
• POWERFUL
  A monitoring solution cannot be just easy to use; it must also provide applicable information in a effective fashion. The monitoring solution must be easy enough to use for a novice user and it must be able to provide detailed information to expert user as well. Jennifer provides advanced data that was not considered to be important by other APM solution such as Socket OPEN, File usage, JDBC resource, etc… Jennifer allows user to customize the monitoring categories via monitoring framework (ADF), and administrator can utilize these function to effectively monitor and troubleshoot their system.