J2EE Web Transaction Agent

Introduction:

This section is common to all the editions of IT360, as per the below constraints;

Professional Edition
Enterprise Edition [Applicable to Probes only, and not applicable / relevant to the Central Server, since the configuration of the monitors happens only at the Probe level. However, you may see these discovered monitors from the Central Server]
MSP Edition [Applicable to Probes only, and not applicable / relevant to the Central Server, since the configuration of the monitors happens only at the Probe level. However, you may see these discovered monitors from the Central Server]

Monitor Information:

J2EE Web Transaction Monitor requires an agent, to be plugged in the Application server (e.g. JBoss, Tomcat), to be monitored. Follow the steps given below to deploy the agent;

Copy the 'WebTransactionAgent.jar', present under '<IT360_home>/applications/working/resources', to a local directory in the Application server (e.g. JBoss, Tomcat).
Edit the startup script of the Application server (e.g. JBoss, Tomcat), and add the below command line option to the java runtime environment;
-javaagent:<Path to the WebTransactionAgent.jar>
Restart the Application server (e.g. JBoss, Tomcat).

Example:

To enable J2EE Web Transaction Monitor in JBoss application Server, do the following :

Copy the J2EE web transactions agent ('WebTransactionAgent.jar'), under '<IT360_home>/applications/working/resources', to a local directory of the server, where JBoss is installed.
Edit the 'run.sh/bat', under JBoss 'home/bin'. Append the following command to 'JAVA_OPTS';
'JAVA_OPTS =-javaagent:<Path to the WebTransactionAgent.jar>'
Restart JBoss.

By default, only the standard J2EE classes are instrumented for performance metrics. This includes Servlet, JSP, EJB and JDBC classes. In order to collect metrics for the user's Java classes, the '<wta.props>' file needs to be configured.

J2EE Web Transaction Agent Configuration:

Configuration is driven via the 'wta.props' file. Properties in 'wta.props' are;

port - Port in which the Agent starts. The default port of the agent is 55555. You can change the default value, according to your requirement.
package-rule - This can contain a value of 'include' or 'exclude'. If specified as include then, only the packages present in the package-list are selected for instrumentation. If specied as exclude then all the packages except for the ones mentioned in the package-list are selected for instrumentation.
package-list - This is a comma separated list of the packages that have to be selected for instrumentation. (The package names can be truncated, for e.g., '<com.test.server.accounts>' can be specified as '<com.test.server>'.

To configure the 'wta.props' file in your Application Server, add '-Dam.wtaconf.dir =<directory', in which the 'wta.props' file is present in JAVA_OPTS. A sample 'wta.props' file is present under '<IT360_home>/applications/working/conf>'.

To verify if the agent has started, look for the message 'Web Transaction agent started at port <55555>', in the startup logs.

Note: This file should be used juditiously because unwanted packages selected for instrumentation will create additional performance overhead on the system.

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