Glassbox: Open Source Monitoring and Troubleshooting

In this session, you will learn how the Glassbox open source troubleshooting and monitoring agent supports low overhead monitoring and troubleshooting without needing to "bake in" instrumentation up front. Glassbox provides an easy to use AJAX interface, an automated installer, and concise summaries of common problems such as database failures, and slow operations caused by thread contention and excessive distributed calls. Glassbox also supports customization and detailed analysis for deeper investigation.

Under the covers, Glassbox uses JMX and aspect-oriented programming to discover applications, track performance, and automatically diagnose common problems in Java applications. You will see how Glassbox can be extended easily with XML, AspectJ, and Spring AOP, providing a useful foundation for customized application monitoring. See also http://www.glassbox.com/ for more information.

You will learn: Common failure scenarios for Java applications, Techniques to quickly diagnose problems, How to build custom Glassbox monitors to gather new data, How to plug in new operations and analysis concepts with Glassbox, How to use Glassbox to plug into existing systems monitoring infrastructures, A foundation to effectively incorporate Glassbox into solutions.

About Ron Bodkin

Ron Bodkin is the chief software architect of Quantcast, an open ratings service for Web sites. Ron is also the founder of New Aspects of Software, which provides consulting and training on aspect-oriented software development and effective architectures for Java. Ron is also the leader of the open source Glassbox application performance troubleshooting project.

Previously, Ron led the first implementation projects and training efforts for customers of the AspectJ group at Xerox PARC. Prior to that, Ron was a founder and the CTO of C-bridge, a consultancy that delivered enterprise applications using Java frameworks.

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