MONITORING MULTI-PLATFORM TRANSACTIONS

• US 20090150908A1
• Filed: 12/07/2007
• Published: 06/11/2009
• Est. Priority Date: 12/07/2007
• Status: Active Grant

• Current Assignee: CA, Inc. (d/b/a CA Technologies) (Broadcom, Inc.)
• Original Assignee: CA, Inc. (d/b/a CA Technologies) (Broadcom, Inc.)
• Inventors: Mogayzel, Mark, Sengupta, Sushmita, Pandit, Aditya, Shankaranarayanan, Kartik
• Granted Patent: US 9,021,505 B2
• Time in Patent Office: Days
• US Class Current: 719/320
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 11/3404 for parallel or distributed programming
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 11/3495 for systems
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 2209/509 Offload
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 2209/542 Intercept
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 9/466 Transaction processing
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 9/5055 considering software capabilities, i.e. software resources associated or available to the machine
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 9/54 Interprogram communication

Abstract

A monitoring system monitors and provides performance data for a transaction performed by multiple applications over different platforms. The monitoring system provides the ability to initiate collection of transaction data from applications on multiple platforms. A request for a multi-platform transaction such as an SAP transaction is received by a first application, such as a JAVA application, on a first platform. Processing of the transaction triggers the first application to invoke a second application, such as an ABAP application, on a second platform. Code inserted into the first application intercepts the invocation of the second application, remotely executes a function on the second platform while providing a transaction identifier to an application server providing the second platform, and returns control back to the first application, which proceeds to invoke the second application to complete the multi-platform transaction. Performance data for the first application and the second application is accessed and correlated based on the transaction identifier to enable reporting of transaction performance over the two platforms.

Claims

1. A method for reporting data, including:

receiving a request to perform a transaction by a first application provided on a first platform;

determining the transaction should be processed by a second application provided on a second platform;

transmitting a transaction identifier by the first application to the second application;

invoking the second application to process a second request by the first application, where the second request is generated in response to receiving the first request by the first application; and

reporting runtime application data associated with performance of the first application and second application, the runtime application data for both applications containing the transaction identifier.

2. The method of claim 1, further comprising:

initiating a trace on multiple platforms, wherein said step of initiating includes,

creating a UT to initiate a single transaction trace on agents running on multiple platforms, and

extending the agent on multiple platforms to handle the transaction trace request.

3. The method of claim 1, wherein said step of determining includes:

generating a call to the second application by the first application; and

intercepting the call to the second application by code inserted into the first application.

4. The method of claim 1, wherein said step of transmitting transaction identification to the second application includes:

generating a transaction identifier;

appending the transaction identifier to a dynamic function name; and

executing a first function at the second application server using the dynamic function name.

5. The method of claim 4, wherein the first function is a copy function, said step of executing a function name includes:

executing the copy function to copy the copy function to the dynamic function name during initialization; and

executing the dynamic function each time

6. The method of claim 5, further comprising:

storing the dynamic function name at the first application server.

7. The method of claim 5, further comprising:

wherein the transaction identification information is contained in the dynamic function name.

8. The method of claim 1, further comprising:

accessing a first set of performance data for the first application and a second set of performance data for the second application; and

correlating the accessed performance data.

9. The method of claim 8, wherein said step of correlating includes:

identifying the transaction identification information in the first set of performance data and the second set of performance data, wherein the first application is a JAVA application and the second application is a SAP ABAP application

10. The method of claim 1, further comprising performing an initialization process before processing user requests, comprising:

importing a function to the second application server;

generating a first random identifier;

generating a copy of the function, the function copy having a name that includes the first random identifier.

11. One or more processor readable storage devices having processor readable code embodied on said processor readable storage devices, said processor readable code for programming one or more processors to perform a method comprising:

receiving a user request to perform a SAP transaction by a first application provided on a first platform;

intercepting an invocation of a remote ABAP application provided on a second platform, the invocation generated by the first application;

sending a unique identifier to the second application as part of a method call in response to said step of intercepting the invocation;

invoking the second application by the first application; and

transmitting performance data for performance of the first application associated performing the SAP transaction, the performance data including the unique identifier.

12. The one or more processor readable storage devices of claim 11, wherein said step of sending a unique identifier includes:

generating a random identifier by an agent;

creating a first function name which includes the random identifier by the agent;

remotely executing a function on a server containing the ABAP application by the agent, the function associated with the first function name; and

storing the function name by the agent.

13. The one or more processor readable storage devices of claim 11, where the remotely executed function executes to copy a copy function at the server containing the ABAP function, the remotely executed function having the first function name.

14. The one or more processor readable storage devices of claim 11, wherein the first application is a JAVA application, the JAVA application and the ABAP application collectively performing the SAP transaction.

15. The one or more processor readable storage devices of claim 11, said steps of intercepting an invocation, sending a unique identifier and transmitting performance data performed by code added to an existing application.

16. A method for reporting data, including:

generating application runtime data based on execution of a first application, the execution in response to a client request received by the first application;

intercepting an invocation of a second application by the first application;

executing a function on the second application server in response to said step of intercepting the invocation;

resuming the invocation of the second application;

accessing a set of records for the executed function and the invocation of the second application; and

correlating a portion of the application runtime data for the first application and a portion of set of records for the second application that correspond to the client request.

17. The method of claim 16, wherein said step of intercepting the invocation includes:

intercepting a call by code inserted into the first application.

18. The method of claim 17, wherein the client code is inserted using bytecode instrumentation.

19. The method of claim 16, wherein said step of executing a function includes:

generating a transaction identifier;

transmitting the transaction identifier to the second application with a call to remotely execute the function.

20. The method of claim 19, wherein the remotely executed function name includes the transaction identifier.

21. The method of claim 16, reporting performance data for a portion of a transaction performed by the first application in response to the request.

22. A system for monitoring a transaction, comprising:

a first application able to process a request received from a client and provided on a first application server implementing a first platform, the first application able to initiate a multi-platform transaction and invoke a second application;

a first agent able to generate a transaction identifier for the request and provide a first set of performance data for the first application which includes the transaction identifier; and

a second agent in communication with a second application on a second application server implementing a second platform, the second agent configured to retrieve a second set of performance data from the second application server,

said first agent able to remotely execute a first function on the second application server, the second set of performance data including data for the second application and the first function executed on the second application server and including the transaction identifier

23. The system of claim 22, further comprising:

a manager in communication with the first agent and the second agent, the manager able to initiate collection of transaction data on the first agent and the second agent and able to receive the first set of performance data from the first agent and the second set of performance data from the second agent,

the manager further able to correlate a portion of the first set of performance data and the second set of performance data associated with the transaction identifier.

24. The system of claim 22, wherein the agent generates a dynamic function name from the transaction identifier, stores the dynamic function name at the first application server and executes the dynamic function on the second application server.

25. The system of claim 22, wherein the first application is a JAVA application, the request is a request to perform an SAP transaction, and the second agent is configured to communicate with an ABAP application.