April 2016

Newest. Hottest. Tracers.

Today MoSKito 2.7.3 is released, and it contains the hottest feature since long time. But decide for yourself. The feature request goes back some years to Dec 02, 2010 to my time at Parship, as Malte once asked, if it would be possible to know where a call to a method actually came from. It was on the list since then, but time was hard to find. So what are tracers anyway? Tracers have 3 purposes or aspects: Tracers allow you to find out which part of your code has been calling some methods in a class of your application you are interested in. They achieve it by guarding the class in question (works with most monitoring points) and triggering and saving a stack trace once something passes by. This is useful if you see strange behavior of some method/class in the MoSKito monitoring, but don't know who is actually using this class. After the execution has passed the tracer, the tracer start to record everything that happens afterwards. This means that a TracedCall (part of MoSKito Journey) is created on the fly and recorded. Every call on the monitored class will be noted, along with parameters and return values. To round this up, tracer will gather some amount of traces (code passing by). Depending on how you configured MoSKito, the tracers could collect only calls with largest duration or simply oldest or newest calls. This way you can run a tracer over a long period of time, collect all slow calls and investigate what slows them down. (more…)

Leon April 12, 2016