What’s New in HP Diagnostics 9.02

[#1]

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We recently released a new version of HP Diagnostics.  In this post, I’ll spend some time discussing 4 key new benefits you will get with this upgraded version.

1.  Smart Transaction Instance Capture

Why It’s Needed 

You need to be able to quickly diagnose intermittent application issues with minimal overhead.  Approaches that simply “turn on” capture for a specified time are putting more load on the system (degrading the user experience) and causing a large manual inspection process to filter through the output (longer isolation times).

What It Does

Smart Transaction Instance Capture is an On Demand Call Profile Collection tool that simplifies the methods to collect transaction flows, so you can see what it is causing the issue.  Capture options include:

•      By LATENCY - ONLY capture transaction instances that are slower than X s
•      By CPU TTIME - ONLY capture transaction instances that take more than 10 μs CPU time
•     By HTTP Status – ONLY capture transactions that returned an HTTP error code XXX
•    By Consumer ID – ONLY capture transactions for a specific group of end users

Benefit To You

Reduced overhead – flexibility to capture call profiles based on intelligent conditions

Reduced MTTR – let Diagnostics find the interesting instances for you

Now, you can configure call profile collection based on certain conditions you specify in order to aid troubleshooting of a sporadic problem or an issue affecting a subset of users.  This allows you to narrow in on a problem area and use the call profiles that are collected to isolate the performance or availability issue in your application.

2. Enhanced Virtualization Support

Why Its Needed

In a VMware environment, users need to see the performance of underlying VMware Host servers and VMware guest neighbors when looking at performance issues.

What It Does

A new collector has been created that connects to VMware Virtual Center to gather performance metrics.  These metrics are fed into two new screens:  VMware Hosts and VMware Guests.  A user can drill to and from a host in the Host View to the corresponding guest in the VMware Guest View.  This provides a connection between a VMware Guest and the probes that are running on it as wells as a connection between a Host and the VMware Host it may be running on as a guest.

Benefit To You

You can now drill from your application servers in Diagnostics all the way down to the underlying ESX server’s performance.  This gives you the visibility into the virtualization layer’s impact on their application’s performance.

 

3. Database Discovery – Linking DB to the Business Transaction

Why Its Needed

You need to have a link from a business transaction to the underlying database CI in order to have a complete picture of the infrastructure the transaction runs on.

What It Does

Customers were excited when Diagnostics 9.0 connected their Business Process Management (BPM) transactions with the underlying J2EE/.NET infrastructure via the Run-time Service Model. 

The Run-time service model delivers the unique ability to capture and leverage data collected from a variety of real-time data sources (HP Diagnostics is a big contributor) and apply it to the challenges of maintaining service health, event correlation and application management in a dynamic enterprise.

Diagnostics 9.02 now takes you further by connecting BPM transactions with the underlying DB instance (Oracle or SQL Server).  This information is then populated inside the RtSM.

Benefit To You

View entire end-to-end transaction to get a complete picture of the business transaction. 

 

4. TIBCO end-to-end transaction tracking

Why Its Needed

Customers, who have matured to the SOA application level typically deploy their functionality as Web Services that interact through mediations.  This gives them all the goodness of the SOA enterprise promise as compared to traditional application architectures.

TIBCO’s BusinessWorks (BW) is their web service container and ActiveMatrix Service Bus (AMSB) provides the mediation layer.

But…the TIBCO application development suite of products can be very complex. 

What It Does

HP Diagnostics can track transactions through TIBCO’s components, track DB calls, external web services, etc.  Diagnostics tracks these transactions as they switch threads inside TIBCO’s components – good luck tracking this without some serious smarts!

Once you configure a BizTxn in Diagnostics 9.02,  you see its topology flow through both TIBCO Business Works (web container) & Active Matrix Service Bus Thread-Switching Server Requests (mediation layer). 

See blog post by Ramy Asselin, HP R&D Diagnostics Engineer, for more detailed information regarding this TIBCO support feature.

Benefit To You

Diagnostics provides an end-to-end view of transactions flowing through TIBCO ActiveMatrix Service Bus and TIBCO BusinessWorks Engine. Let Diagnostics do the hard work of following your transactions through TIBCO as it crosses thread boundaries and executes through asynchronous components. Diagnostics will enable you to reduce complexity and time associated with isolating performance and availability of distributed TIBCO applications.

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Hi ..

      Am using HP Daignostics, Having doubt in Host view where there is a memory column. What and which memory usage it contains?

Please advice..

thanks in advance

[#3]

The Host view’s memory column represents the average (%) system memory used on the host system for the currently selected time range.

The Probe view has a memory column, “VM Heap Used”, which represents the amount of heap space used by a Java or.NET Application Server.

Hope that helps.