AUTOMATIC BASELINING OF RESOURCE CONSUMPTION FOR TRANSACTIONS

• US 20090199196A1
• Filed: 02/01/2008
• Published: 08/06/2009
• Est. Priority Date: 02/01/2008
• 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: Peracha, Zahur
• Granted Patent: US 8,261,278 B2
• Time in Patent Office: Days
• US Class Current: 718/104
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 11/3409 for performance assessment
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 11/3452 Performance evaluation by statistical analysis
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 11/3466 Performance evaluation by tracing or monitoring
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 2201/81 Threshold
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 2201/815 Virtual
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 2201/87 Monitoring of transactions
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 2201/875 Monitoring of systems including the internet
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 2201/88 Monitoring involving counting

Abstract

An application monitoring system determines the health of one or more resources used to process a transaction, business application, or other computer process. Performance data is generated in response to monitoring application execution and processed to determine and an actual and baseline value for resource usage data. Resource usage baseline data may be determined from previous resource usage data associated with a resource and particular transaction (a resource-transaction pair). The baseline values are compared to actual values to determine a deviation for the actual value. Deviation information for the time series data can be reported through an interface or some other manner.

Claims

1. A computer implemented method for monitoring a transaction, comprising:

performing a plurality of transactions by an application using one or more resources;

determining a first usage of each of the one or more resources by a first transaction of the plurality of transactions;

determining a difference between the first usage and a predicted usage for each the one or more resources with respect to the first transaction; and

reporting health information for the one or more resources with respect to the first application, the health information derived from the difference between the first usage and the predicted usage.

2. The computer implemented method of claim 1, wherein said step of determining a first usage includes:

querying a java virtual machine which performs the first transaction

3. The computer implemented method of claim 1, wherein said step of determining a first usage includes:

querying an operating system that communicates with the resources.

4. The computer implemented method of claim 1, wherein said step of determining a first usage includes:

determining a transaction specific use and a non-transaction specific use of one or more of the resources.

5. The computer implemented method of claim 1, wherein said step of determining a first usage includes:

determining a resource usage associated with a thread.

6. The computer implemented method of claim 1, wherein said step of determining the difference includes:

identifying a time window; and

calculating the predicted usage based on a set of performance data associated with the resource, the first transaction and the time window.

7. The computer implemented method of claim 6, wherein said step of calculating includes:

fitting one or more functions to the set of performance data; and

calculating a predicted value using the fitted function.

8. The computer implemented method of claim 1, wherein the resources include a central processing unit, network bandwidth, hard disk bandwidth, and memory.

9. The computer implemented method of claim 1, further including:

monitoring the application while the application is performing the transactions; and

generating performance data in response to monitoring the application, the first usage determined from the performance data.

10. The computer implemented method of claim 1, wherein said step of reporting includes:

reporting an alert if usage of one or more of the resources determined to be abnormal.

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:

accessing performance data generated from monitoring an application and associated with one or more resources used to process requests by the application;

determining a level of use for each of the one or more resources used to process the requests;

determining baseline deviation information for the resource use level with respect to a predicted resource usage while processing one or more requests, the resource use level determined from the performance data; and

reporting the baseline deviation information derived from the difference between the actual resource usage and the predicted resource usage.

12. The one or more processor readable storage devices of claim 11, wherein said step of determining a level of use includes:

determining a level of use for each of the one or more resources while processing a business application, the business application defined as a set of transactions.

13. The one or more processor readable storage devices of claim 11, wherein said step of determining a level of use includes:

determining a resource level of use associated with a thread.

14. The one or more processor readable storage devices of claim 11, wherein said step of determining a level of use includes:

determining a transaction specific resource usage and a non-transaction specific resource usage.

15. The one or more processor readable storage devices of claim 11, wherein determining baseline deviation information:

identifying a time window; and

computing a predicted value for a first data point using data within the time window using a selected function.

16. The one or more processor readable storage devices of claim 17, wherein the time window is a dynamic time window.

17. The one or more processor readable storage devices of claim 11, wherein the baseline deviation information indicates one of two or more levels of health for two or more resources used to process the one or more requests.

18. A computer implemented method for monitoring an application, comprising:

performing transactions by an application on an application server;

determining the usage of one or more resources of the application server while performing a first transaction, the transactions including the first transaction;

accessing a predicted value associated usage of each resource while processing the first application;

determining a difference between the usage and predicted values for each resource; and

reporting deviation information for each resource if the difference is greater than a threshold.

19. The computer implemented method of claim 18, further comprising:

accessing two or more baseline functions;

applying each of the two or more baseline functions to previous resource data usage values to generate predicated resource data for each of the one or more resources; and

deriving the predicted value associated usage of each resource from the predicted resource data for each resource.

20. The computer implemented method of claim 18, further comprising:

accessing performance data generated from monitoring the application, usage of the one or more resources derived from the performance data.

21. The computer implemented method of claim 20, wherein said step of retrieving performance data includes:

inserting monitoring code into the application by bytecode instrumentation; and

generating the performance data using the monitoring code.

22. The computer implemented method of claim 21, wherein said step of generating the performance data includes:

detecting that a class object is created by resource class instantiation;

reporting object data about the class object; and

detecting that the class object is closed.

23. An apparatus for processing data, comprising:

a communication interface;

a storage device;

a hard disk; and

one or more processors in communication with said storage device, hard disk and said communication interface, said one or more processors perform transactions, determine a resource usage level, and report deviation information, the usage level determined for each of the storage device, hard disk and one or more processors for each of the transactions, the deviation information indicating whether the resource usage level differs from an expected resource usage level by more than a threshold.

24. The apparatus of claim 23 further comprising:

a dispatch unit that dispatches instructions from one or more threads to one or more execution pipelines, at least one usage level determined for at least one thread.

25. The apparatus of claim 23, further comprising:

a network communication device in communication with said one or more processors, said one or more processors determine a usage level and deviation information for said network communication device for each of transaction.