Instrumentation of Web Services

Summary

While instrumenting Web services, it is useful to identify the important business transactions that have to be measured. It is also important to identify which transactions are created in the context of another transaction. This is important to identify parent-child relationships between transactions. The parent child relationship identification is necessary to trace the end-to-end flow of transactions through distributed client/systems.

It is also important to keep in mind the target audience for the instrumentation data and the corresponding performance degradation that excessive instrumentation may result into. Certain standards like ARM, SNMP, and JMX exist for instrumentation/manageability of applications. The instrumentation data so obtained may be aggregated and used for calculating higher-level metrics. These higher-level metrics may form the basis of Service-Level Agreements (SLA) and may populate the business-level views exposed to business managers.