Simplifying Software System Monitoring through Application Discovery with ExplorViz

Abstract

Keeping an overview of software systems is a crucial task in the area of software engineering. Often this task is supported by application performance management (APM) tools, e.g., Kieker, a monitoring framework based on dynamic software analysis. Kieker is highly extensible and customizable, but lacks a user-friendly setup configuration due to its framework characteristic. Based on this obstacle, users of our live trace visualization tool ExplorViz, which employs Kieker, experience problems during monitoring their applications. In this paper, we report on our ExplorViz application discovery and monitoring management system (ADAMMS) to circumvent this drawback. The key concept is to utilize a software agent that simplifies the discovery of running applications within operating systems. Furthermore, the ADAMMS properly configures and manages Kieker instances to monitor these applications. Thereupon, we demonstrate how the monitoring procedure can be eased and how both open source projects ExplorViz and Kieker mutually benefit from our approach. Finally, we conduct a first pilot study to evaluate the usability of our approach with respect to an easy-to-use application monitoring.