The document presents strategies for capturing top Java performance metrics, focusing on business transactions, external dependencies, caching strategy, garbage collection, and application topology. It emphasizes the importance of performance monitoring and offers tips for optimizing application performance using tools like AppDynamics. Insights from industry experts highlight the significance of effective performance measurement to enhance user experience and reduce operational costs.

1. Top 5 Java Performance Metrics,
Tips & Tricks
Steven Haines, Java Expert and Author

2. Agenda
• Introduction
• Top 5 Performance Metrics to capture in Java
applications
• Business Transactions
• External Dependencies
• Caching Strategy
• Garbage Collection
• Application Topology
• Performance Monitoring Tips & Tricks
• Questions and Answers

3. About the Speakers
Steven Haines
• Author of two Java programming books and a
Java performance management book, over 500
articles, and a dozen white papers
• Former Java instructor at the University of
California, Irvine (UCI)
• Spent the better part of the last 6 years working
as an architect on Walt Disney World’s
MyMagic+ and other Disney initiatives
Anand Akela
• Director, Product Marketing, AppDynamics

4. Introduction
Why is performance so important?
• Cost to business
• Cost to reputation
• Sleepless nights…
Top 5 Performance Metrics to capture
• There are so many metrics and so many different
strategies to interpret them so how do we get the
biggest bang for our efforts?
• This presentation reviews strategies for identifying
performance issues in your application

5. Top 5 performance metrics to capture

6. #1 Business Transactions
• Business Transactions (BTs) capture real users
interacting with your application
• Capture requests from an entry-point
• Web request, Servlet, Struts Action, Spring MVC
Controller, message on a message queue, etc.
• Follow the request through the container
• Identify exit-points through which the request
goes to another container
• Web service call, RMI, JDBC, JMS, etc.
• Instrument every container and correlate BT
segments from each container into the holistic BT

7. Business Transactions

8. Baselines
• Baselines: measure what “normal” is and
determine whether or not your business
transactions are behaving “normally”
• Baseline Types
• Response times over a period of time
• Response times based on hour of day
• Response times based on hour of day and day of week
• Response times based on hour of day and day of
month

9. Baseline Alerts

10. #2 External Dependencies
• An external dependency is any system with
which your application interacts to accomplish its
business goal
• Web services, Databases (SQL and NoSQL), Legacy
Systems, Caches, Key/Value Stores, etc.
• Differentiate between applications problems and
dependency problems
• If your dependencies are not automatically
identified by your APM solution, configure them!

11. #3 Caching Strategy
• It is always faster to serve an object from
memory than it is to make a network call to
retrieve data from a dependent source
• IMHO, people that do not like caching are not
configuring them properly
• Two types of errors
• Loading too much data into your cache
• Not properly sizing the cache

12. Cache Thrashing

13. #4 Garbage Collection
• Garbage collection has been and continues to be the
biggest component of poor JVM performance
• It removed the notion of manual memory management
and eliminated traditional memory leaks, but at the cost
of sometimes cumbersome garbage collection processes
• Different JVMs have different strategies that each
introduce their own set of benefits and challenges
• Understanding how garbage collection works will help you tune it
• For this discussion we’ll review the Sun JVM

14. Reachability Test

15. Minor and Major GCs
Minor Collection Major Collection

16. #5 Application Topology
• With the advent of the cloud, applications can
now be elastic in nature: your application
environment can grow and shrink to meet your
user demand
• Take inventory of your servers and ensure that
your environment is sized optimally
• Too many servers means a higher cloud cost and
wasted resources
• Too few servers means that servers will be
overburdened and your business transactions will
suffer

17. Performance Monitoring
Tips & Tricks

18. Business Transaction Optimization
• It is important to capture the business
transactions that are important to you
• Properly name BTs to match your business processes
• Filter out the BTs that are not important
• Capture BTs properly
• Default behavior may not match your business needs
• If your URLs are complex then tell AppDynamics how
to interpret them
• If you have a central controller that differentiates
functionality by payload then configure it as such
• Etc.

19. Snapshot Tuning
• Snapshots are invaluable in helping you identify the root
cause of your performance problems; they give you a
trace through your entire business transaction with
associated response times
• Default snapshot configuration samples threads every
10ms
• If you do not need this level of granularity then increasing the
interval will reduce overhead at the cost of granularity
• Slow transactions are configured to capture up to 5
samples per minute for 5 minutes
• If you typically only examine two or three snapshots then turn this
down

20. Threshold Tuning
• Thresholds control when alerts are raised and
when snapshots are triggered
• Three types of thresholds:
• Static SLA
• Standard Deviation
• Percentage
• Choose and configure the strategy that meets
your business needs

21. Tier Management
• AppDynamics measures and evaluates
performance at the business transaction level as
well as at the segment level
• Segments are defined by the tiers that
implement them and are transitioned via exit-
points
• Standard protocols are available out-of-the-box
• If you have non-standard communication
protocols then you need to tell AppDynamics
when your code is leaving a tier

22. Context…
• Many times, when performance issues occur,
contextual information can provide you with
much needed debug content
• AppDynamics allows you to capture
• HTTP Headers
• JMS Properties
• HTTP Query Parameters
• Method Parameter Values

23. Intelligent Container Recycling
• As applications are moving to the cloud, your
infrastructure is changing
• Smart deployment strategies allow you add
servers to and remove servers from your
environment to meet user demand
• Cycle your virtual machines or containers
intelligently
• Shutdown your oldest machines first so that virtual
machines have short lives
• Anecdotal example: eliminating garbage collection
through smart recycling!

24. Summary
• Performance is a measurable concern
• We reviewed 5 metrics to capture to help us identify
performance problems
• We reviewed tips-and-tricks for configuring
AppDynamics for optimal performance troubleshooting
http://blog.appdynamics.com/java/top-5-java-performance-metrics-to-capture-
in-enterprise-applications/

25. Today’s Monitoring: Many Silo-ed Tools
33%
issues are reported by
end users
77%
issues require 5+ people-
hour to resolve
* Survey response from 302 IT
professionals conducted by EMA
65%
enterprises have 10+
monitoring tools.
0%
1%
13%
21%
22%
15%
9%
6%
3%
10%
0% 5% 10% 15% 20% 25%
0
1
2-5
6-10
11-25
26-40
41-50
50-75
76-100
More than 100
Q: how many enterprise monitoring/mgmt products would you estimate your IT org owns?*

26. AppDynamics Unified Monitoring
One Solution : One UI, One Data Platform, One Install
Copyright © 2014 AppDynamics. All rights reserved. 26
Industry-first application-centric Unified monitoring platform

27. Copyright © 2015 AppDynamics. All rights reserved. 27
 Business transaction-centric
management
 Role-relevant views for quick
troubleshooting
 One Unified Platform - Easy to
deploy and Use, Flexible
Deployment
 Comprehensive Application
Infrastructure Support
Key Focus Areas of Unified Monitoring

28. AppDynamics Unified Monitoring Pays off for Paychex
Copyright © 2014 AppDynamics. All rights reserved. 28
Challenges Benefits
Why AppDynamics?
• Tool consolidation – replaced 5 tools with
AppDynamics
• Improved capacity-planning capabilities
• Increased troubleshooting efficiency and staff
prioritization
• Too many monitoring tools and many of them
didn’t meet expectations
• Lack of deep visibility into the application
infrastructure
• Existing monitoring tools couldn’t support the
continuous delivery model with 3 code releases
per week
• Quickly drill down into performance data to troubleshoot
issues
• Integration with enterprise logging and management tools
• Exceptional training and technical support
“AppDynamics replaced 5 tools we once used to try to troubleshoot application problems.
Today, everyone goes to AppDynamics to quickly determine the root cause of the issue.”
- Jason Briggs, Monitoring Engineering Manager, Paychex
https://www.appdynamics.com/case-study/paychex/

29. Join us in Vegas for our annual user conference,
AppSphere!
- Free training for all attendees
- Exclusive access to AppDynamics executives and engineers
- A sneak peek at our roadmap and announcements about new features
- Keynotes from industry innovators
- Information-packed breakout sessions from users in the trenches
- Peer-to-peer networking
Learn more and register now at Appdynamics.com/AppSphere

30. Q&A

31. Sign-up for your Free Trial today!
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