Working With Other Debugging Tools

You can use the following Sun Microsystems’ and third-party tools to identify potential performance bottlenecks:

• Identity Manager Profiler

• Using DTrace

• Using JMX

• Using JConsole

• Using JRat

These tools can be particularly useful if your deployment uses custom Java classes.

Identity Manager Profiler

Identity Manager provides a Profiler utility to help you troubleshoot performance problems in your deployment.

Customized forms, Java, rules, workflows, and XPRESS can cause performance and scale problems. The Profiler profiles how much time is spent in these different areas, enabling you to determine whether these forms, Java, rules, workflows, or XPRESS objects are contributing to performance and scale problems and, if so, which parts of these objects are causing the problems.

For more information about Profiler, see Working with the Identity Manager Profiler in Sun Identity Manager 8.1 Release Notes.

Using DTrace

The DTrace facility is a dynamic tracing framework for the Solaris 10 operating system that enables you to monitor JVM activity.

DTrace contains more than 30,000 probes and uses integrated user-level and kernel-level tracing to give you a view into your production system. You can also trace arbitrary data and expressions by using the D language, which is similar to C or awk. The DTrace facility also includes special support for monitoring the JVM, and enables you to watch your whole system and span outside the JVM.

DTrace is easiest to use with Java 6 because probes are built into the JVM. The facility also works with Java 1.4 and Java 5, but you must download JVM PI or JVM TI agents from the following URL:

https://solaris10-dtrace-vm-agents.dev.java.net/

The following example shows how to write a DTrace script.

Example 4–2 Example DTrace Script

#!/usr/sbin/dtrace -Zs 
#pragma D option quiet
hotspot$1::: 
{
  printf("%s\n", probename); 
}

In this example, you would replace $1 with the first argument to the script, which is the PID of the Java process you want to monitor. For example:

# ./all-jvm-probes.d 1234

The following table describes the commands you can use to enable different DTrace probes.

Because DTrace causes additional work in the system, enabling this facility affects system performance. The effect is often negligible, but can become substantial if you enable many probes with costly enablings.

Instructions for minimizing the performance effect of DTrace are provided in the “Performance Considerations” chapter of the Solaris Dynamic Tracing Guide.

For more information about DTrace, see /usr/demo/dtrace and man dtrace.

Using JMX

Identity Manager enables you to use Java Management Extensions (JMX) to capture and expose operational statistics for certain resource adapter operations. You can use this data for diagnostic and predictive purposes, such as to monitor system health and reports.

This statistical data includes the following:

• The number of times the action was performed

• The minimum, maximum, and average duration of the operations

JMX creates MBeans for each resource adapter, by server, and registers these beans with names that match the following pattern:

serverName=server name, resourceAdapterType=Resource Adapter Type,
resourceAdapterName=Resource Adapter Name

Identity Manager records statistics for all completed operations, whether they completed successfully or with errors. However, Identity Manager does not record statistics for incomplete operations, such as any operations that throw exceptions.

You can configure excludes as follows:

1. From the Administrator interface, select Configure -> Servers.

2. On the Configure Servers page, perform one of the following tasks:

   • Click the Edit Default Server Settings button to edit the default server settings.

   • Click a server link to edit the policy for that server.

3. Click the JMX tab and enable the JMX Enable Resource Adapter Monitor box to turn on resource monitoring.

   • To exclude specific resources, add regular expressions to the JMX Resource Adapter Monitor Excludes list.

   • To exclude monitoring specific actions, add regular expressions to the JMX Resource Adapter Monitor Operation Excludes list.

All excludes use regular expressions. For excluding certain resources, JMX just matches on the resource name. For example, if you have adapters named

resource1
resource2
resource3
resource10
resource11

and you specify the following pattern

.*1$

which means, match any 0 or more of any character (.*) until something that ends with a 1 (1$). JMX will exclude resource1 and resource11.

For operations, the process is similar. If your operations have the following names, the patterns must match against those names.

ACCOUNT_CREATE
ACCOUNT_UPDATE
ACCOUNT_DELETE
ACCOUNT_GET
ACCOUNT_AUTHENTICATE
OBJECT_CREATE
OBJECT_UPDATE
OBJECT_DELETE
OBJECT_GET
OBJECT_LIST
ACTION_RUN

For example, the ^ACCOUNT.* pattern excludes all operations that start with ACCOUNT. Or, using this pattern excludes updates and deletes:

.*UPDATE$
.*DELETE$

For more information about configuring and using JMX, see Configuring JMX Monitoring and The JMX Publisher Type in Sun Identity Manager 8.1 Business Administrator’s Guide.

Using JConsole

The Java Monitoring and Management Console (JConsole) is a Java Management Extension (JMX) technology-compliant graphical management tool that is co-packaged with at least JDK 5. JConsole connects to a running JVM and gathers information from the JVM MBeans in the connected JMX agent.

Specifically, you can use JConsole to perform the following tasks:

• Detect low memory and deadlocks

  JConsole accesses the memory system, memory pools, and MBeans garbage collector to provide information about memory use, including memory consumption, memory pools, and garbage collection statistics.

• Enable or disable garbage collection

• Enable or disable verbose tracing

• Monitor local and remote applications

• Monitor and manage MBeans including current heap memory use, non-heap memory use, and how many objects are pending for finalization

• View information about performance, resource consumption, and server statistics

• View summary information about the JVM and monitored values, threads running on the application, and loaded classes

• View information about operating system resources (Sun’s platform extension), such as:

  • CPU process time

  • How much total and free physical memory is available

  • The amount of committed virtual memory (how much virtual memory is guaranteed to be available to the running process)

  • How much total and free swap space is available

  • The number of open file descriptions (UNIX®only)

For more information about using JConsole to monitor applications on the Java platform, see the Sun Developer Network (SDN) article titled Using JConsole to Monitor Applications, which is available from the following URL:

http://java.sun.com/developer/technicalArticles/J2SE/jconsole.html

Identity Manager supplies some JMX MBeans that provide information about the following:

• Identity Manager Server Cluster

• Data Exporter

• Scheduler

Using JRat

You can use the Java Runtime Analysis Toolkit (JRat), an open-source performance profiler for the Java platform, to identify potential performance bottlenecks, especially if your deployment uses custom Java classes. JRat monitors your application’s execution and persists the application’s performance measurements.

For example, if you have a custom workflow for provisioning, you can use JRat to see which classes are being invoked and how much time is required to run your workflow compared to the default Identity Manager provisioning workflow.

For more information about JRat, see http://jrat.sourceforge.net.