Diagnostics beyond OracleAS Control Console

by Eduardo Rodrigues

One of the many companies recently acquired by Oracle is a small one called "Auptyma", whose founder and former CEO, Mr. Virag Saksena, was previously Director of the CRM Performance Group at Oracle. It's main contribution for Oracle's fast growing product line was its "Java Application Monitor" which is now part of the "Oracle Fusion Middleware Management Packs" (that's where http://www.auptyma.com now takes us to) and was renamed to "Oracle Application Diagnostics for Java" or simply Oracle AD4J (although it's also referred as JADE as in Java Application Diagnostics Expert). Holy alphabet soup!

The "new" component integrates the Oracle Enterprise Manager 10g Grid Control suite but it also lives as a separate product, which is great, specially for us developers. It can be downloaded from http://www.oracle.com/technology/software/products/oem/htdocs/jade.html. The installer is very small and also very easy and intuitive.

AD4J may seem awkward at first, when you notice the fact that it also installs and uses the old Apache JServ and a PostgreSQL database. But it's worth it!

I've tried AD4J with my OC4J 10.1.3.3 standalone and I can say it works pretty well and is certainly a much more interesting and useful diagnostics tool than OracleAS 10g Control Console with JVM metrics enabled. My only extra work was to reinstall JDK 1.5.0_14 and reconfigure OC4J to use it (I was already update 15) because it's the most recent JDK 1.5.0 update currently supported by AD4J.

Its main features includes:

• Production diagnostics with no application instrumentation, saving time in reproducing problems.


• Visibility into Java activity including in-flight transactions, allowing administrators to proactively identify issues rather than diagnosing after-the-fact (application hangs, crashes, memory leaks, locks).


• Tracing of transactions from Java to Database and vice-versa, enabling faster resolution of problems that span different tiers.


• Differential heap analysis in production applications.


• Possibility to setup alerts based on configured thresholds and forward them using SNMP (which means potential integration with other enterprise monitoring products like OpenView, for instance)

As you can see, it's a pretty interesting, yet small and simple, diagnostic and monitoring tool for Java applications. You can also check these resources for further info:

• Oracle Enterprise Manager 10g Grid Control - Application Performance Management Focus
• an Oracle AD4J presentation

Cheers and... keep reading!