Implementation of management agent and application  

A management agent was built, which receives the information from the measurement correlator. It stores the information and forwards it to arbitrary management applications. To achieve independence from the underlying platform and programming language, the information is coded in XML.

Our management application gets the information from the management agent and visualizes it. Figure  shows a screenshot. It illustrates an instance of an exemplary user transaction (called QuickSortUTA) that simply does a delay of six seconds and then starts sorting an array.

 

Figure: Prototypical management application for the visualization of transaction instances 

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Using the fields "Transaction(s) by Name" and "Transaction(s) by Instance", an instance of a user transaction to be visualized can be chosen. The right side of the window shows the transaction instance as well as all of its subtransactions. As can be seen from the figure, the QuickSortUTA starts with a user interaction in the start button, followed by sequential calls (visualized by the two vertical lines) to a DelayBean and a bean called SortItem. The SortItem forks a new thread (visualized by the horizontal line) that actually does the sort. By different colors, the status of each of the transactions is illustrated.

The lower left part of the windows shows detailed information about subtransactions that can be requested by clicking on the appropriate rectangle. In the example, information about the DelayAction executed by the DelayBean is shown. Both the start time and the duration of the execution can be seen. Further information concerning the component, the name of the transaction or the status of the transaction is likewise available.