1 How to Read this Guide

Monitoring distributed applications requires the use of several products, each of which examines a different aspect of application performance. This guide explains how you can use these products singly and together to monitor your application. It also provides a summary of the workflow required to install, configure, and work with these products. It includes the following chapters:

• Chapter 2, "Monitoring Performance" introduces the process of monitoring distributed applications. It describes RUEI, BTM, JVMD, and EM, which you use to monitor performance, it explains how you set up end-to-end monitoring, and it looks at how security schemes translate across different monitoring contexts.

• Chapter 3, "Understanding the User Experience" explains how you use Real User Experience Insight (RUEI) to understand how users are interacting with your product. Using the measurements that RUEI collects, you can assess the effectiveness of user interface design, the responsiveness of web servers and the internet, and the success of user operations.

• Chapter 4, "Discovering Services and Working with Transactions" describes how you use Business Transaction Management (BTM) to discover all the components that make up your application, and to select a subset of these for special attention. Monitoring this subset (transaction) allows you to identify and resolve issues related to performance, to profiling usage, and to finding the cause of failing components in a business process.

• Chapter 5, "Getting Detailed Execution Information" explains how you use Java Virtual Machine Diagnostics to look at the finest details of code execution and to identify problems like race conditions, blocked threads, and memory leaks.

• Chapter 6, "Monitoring Business Applications" describes how you create a Business Application, and how you use the Enterprise Manager (EM) console to get summary and detail information about the user experience and transaction performance related to that Business Application.

• Chapter 7, "Monitoring End-to-end Performance" provides an example that illustrates how you use RUEI, BTM, and JVMD together to troubleshoot an issue from the user experience to the finest machine-level details.

This guide is meant to be read sequentially, from beginning to end. If you are familiar with any of the individual components described, we still recommend that you read those subsections that describe how you navigate from one component to others.

This guide is not exhaustive. It is a map rather than a compendium. The bulk of material describing how monitoring components work, is found in other documents. Cross references to additional material are provided for your convenience.