Monitoring and diagnostics of business transaction failures

• US 10,255,158 B2
• Filed: 10/15/2013
• Issued: 04/09/2019
• Est. Priority Date: 10/15/2013
• Status: Active Grant

• Current Assignee: Oracle International Corporation (Oracle Corporation)
• Original Assignee: Oracle International Corporation (Oracle Corporation)
• Inventors: Kapur, Kunal, Papadopoulos, Constantinos, Lay, Timothy, Inamdar, Rajendra, Vlatas, Anthony G.
• Primary Examiner(s): Truong, Loan L. T.
• Application Number:
  US14/053,922
• Publication Number:
  US 20150106659A1
• Time in Patent Office: 2,002 Days
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 11/3612 by runtime analysis performance monitoring G06F11/3466
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 11/3644 by instrumenting at runtime
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 2201/865 Monitoring of software

Abstract

Systems, methods, and other embodiments associated with reconfiguring applications and monitoring exceptions are described. In one embodiment, a computer implemented method analyzes executable code of an application and identifies an exception handling clause. The method modifies the executable code by reconfiguring the exception handling clause to call a monitoring agent and pass information associated with an exception that occurs during execution of the executable code.

Claims

1. A non-transitory computer-readable medium storing computer-executable instructions that when executed by a computer including a processor cause the computer to programmatically:

search an executable code stored in a memory, using at least hardware of the computer, to identify a plurality of exception handling clauses within the executable code;

at each exception handling clause of the plurality of exception handling clauses identified in the executable code, insert into the executable code additional exception handling code as part of each of the exception handling clauses, wherein the additional exception handling code is configured (i) to collect information about an exception corresponding to the respective exception handling clause when the exception occurs during execution of the executable code, and (ii) to transmit the information about the corresponding exception to a monitoring agent;

check whether there is additional executable code to search after each time the additional exception handling code is inserted into one of the plurality of exception handling clauses; and

terminate the search in response to the absence of additional executable code.

2. The non-transitory computer-readable medium of claim 1, further comprising instructions that when executed by the computer cause the computer to:

associate a business transaction with the exception after the exception occurs during execution of the executable code by associating data identifying a thread of execution for the executable code and data identifying a thread of execution for the business transaction.

3. The non-transitory computer-readable medium of claim 2, wherein the associating further comprises instructions that when executed by the computer cause the computer to:

monitor the execution of the executable code and collect data from business transactions;

in response to receiving a call from one of the additional exception handling code inserted as part of one of the plurality of exception handling clauses wherein the call includes the information about the exception, analyze context from the collected data and determining the business transaction that corresponds to the exception; and

associate the exception to the corresponding business transaction.

4. The non-transitory computer-readable medium of claim 1, further comprising instructions that when executed by the computer cause the computer to search for and identify selected exception handling clauses including a plurality of try-catch blocks within the executable code and insert the additional exception handling code into the plurality of try-catch blocks.

5. The non-transitory computer-readable medium of claim 1, wherein the method further includes instructions that when executed by the computer cause the computer to perform filtering exceptions by:

capturing and reporting exceptions that are within a context of a business transaction, wherein if an exception is determined to not be part of the business transaction, the exception is filtered out and not reported;

or

comparing exceptions in failed business transactions against baseline healthy transactions, and applying domain knowledge to narrow or identify a root cause exception.

6. The non-transitory computer-readable medium of claim 1, wherein the searching and inserting are performed prior to the executable code being executed.

7. The non-transitory computer-readable medium of claim 1, wherein the additional exception handling code is configured to transmit the information about the exception to the monitoring agent by inserting byte code that calls the monitoring agent when the byte code is executed in response to the exception occurring;

and

wherein the byte code that calls the monitoring agent is programmed to call the monitoring agent that is an application that monitors executing applications, wherein the call is programmed to transmit the information about the exception to the monitoring agent.

8. The non-transitory computer-readable medium of claim 1, wherein the monitoring agent is an executable application that is separate from the executable code and wherein the monitoring agent is configured to determine whether to report the exception after receiving the information about the exception from the additional exception handling code.

20. The non-transitory computer-readable medium of claim 1, further comprising instructions that when executed by the computer cause the computer to:

search for a specific instruction or code that represents the exception handling clause in the executable code.

21. The non-transitory computer-readable medium of claim 1, wherein each exception handling clause identified in the executable code includes an original code for executing a first set of instructions;

and

wherein the additional exception handling code is a second set of instructions different than the first set of instructions in a corresponding exception handling clause.

22. The non-transitory computer-readable medium of claim 1, wherein the method further includes instructions that when executed by the computer cause the computer to perform filtering exceptions by:

determining whether a portion of the executable code has been loaded into memory, and not searching the portion of the executable code if the portion of the executable code has not been loaded into memory;

or

updating filtering logic based on data from previous exceptions to ignore benign exceptions.

23. The non-transitory computer-readable medium of claim 1, further comprising storing computer-executable instructions that when executed by the computer including the processor cause the computer to:

determine a type of instrumentation code to insert based on a type of the exception handling clause being modified for each of the plurality of exception handling clauses where code is inserted by selecting an appropriate code from a library of code.

9. A computer implemented programmatically executing method comprising:

searching, by at least a processor, executable code of an application and identifying a plurality of instances of code where each instance of code representing a try-catch block within the executable code; and

modifying, by at least the processor, the executable code by inserting additional exception handling code as part of each of the identified try-catch blocks, wherein the additional exception handling code is configured to call a monitoring agent and pass data associated with a respective exception that occurs during execution of the executable code;

checking whether there is additional executable code to search after each time the additional exception handling code is inserted into one of the identified try-catch blocks; and

terminating the searching in response to the absence of additional executable code.

10. The computer implemented method of claim 9, wherein the method further includes filtering exceptions by:

capturing and reporting exceptions that are within a context of a business transaction, wherein if an exception is determined to not be part of the business transaction, the exception is filtered out and not reported;

or

comparing exceptions in failed business transactions against baseline healthy transactions, and applying domain knowledge to narrow or identify a root cause exception.

15. The computer implemented method of claim 9,

wherein the modifying includes modifying the executable code at each of the plurality of try-catch blocks to insert additional exception handling code as part of the identified try-catch blocks to at least call the monitoring agent.

16. The computer implemented method of claim 9, further comprising:

associating a business transaction with the exception after the exception occurs during execution of the executable code by associating data identifying a thread of execution for the executable code with data identifying a thread of execution for the business transaction.

17. The computer implemented method of claim 16, wherein the associating further comprises:

monitoring, by the monitoring agent, the execution of the executable code and collecting data from business transactions;

in response to receiving the call from the additional exception handling code inserted into the executable code, wherein the call includes the data associated with the exception, analyzing context from the collected data and determining a business transaction that corresponds to the exception; and

associating the exception to the corresponding business transaction.

18. The computer implemented method of claim 9, further comprising searching for a specific instruction or code that represents the exception handling clause in the executable code.

19. The computer implemented method of claim 9, wherein each try-catch block identified in the executable code includes an original code for executing a first set of instructions;

and wherein inserting the additional exception handling code adds a second set of instructions different than the first set of instructions.

24. The computer implemented method of claim 9, wherein the monitoring agent is configured to perform instrumentation filtering to decide which catch blocks to modify and which catch blocks not to modify based on filtering conditions including:

modifying only catch blocks that are relevant to a specified business transaction; and

modifying only catch blocks that are within methods relevant to a specified business transaction.

11. A computing system comprising:

a processor configured to at least execute instructions;

a memory connected to the processor;

reconfiguration logic, implemented with at least hardware, and instructions that when executed by at least the processor cause the processor to programmatically;

search executable code of an application and identify an exception handling clause within the executable code;

in response to identifying the exception handling clause, modify the executable code by inserting additional exception handling code as part of the exception handling clause that calls a monitoring agent and passes data associated with an exception caught by the corresponding exception handling clause that occurs during execution of the executable code;

check whether there is additional executable code to search after each time the additional exception handling code is inserted into an exception handling clause;

terminate the search in response to the absence of additional executable code; and

repeat the identifying and inserting for a plurality of exception handling clauses in the executable code until the entirety of the executable code has been searched.

12. The computing system of claim 11, wherein the reconfiguration logic is configured to modify the executable code by inserting bytecode as the additional exception handling code as part of the exception handling clause, wherein the bytecode is configured to call the monitoring agent when the byte code is executed in response to the exception occurring.

13. The computing system of claim 11, further comprising the monitoring agent configured to associate a business transaction with the exception caught by the exception handling clause after the exception occurs during execution of the executable code by associating data identifying a thread of execution for the executable code with data identifying a thread of execution for the business transaction.

14. The computing system of claim 11, wherein the monitoring agent is further configured to:

monitor the execution of the executable code and collecting data from business transactions;

in response to receiving the call from one of the additional exception handling code as part of the exception handling clause, wherein the call includes the data associated with the exception, analyze context from the collected data and determine the business transaction that corresponds to the exception; and

associate the exception to the corresponding business transaction.