WAS Control Center: an autonomic performance-triggered tracing environment for Websphere

Studying any aspect of an application server with high availability requirements can become a tedious task when a continuous monitoring of the server status is necessary. The creation of performance-driven autonomic systems can hurry up the analysis of this kind of complex systems. In this paper we present an autonomic performance-driven environment for WebSphere application server that can be used as the basis to construct systems that must monitor the performance of the system. As an applied use of this infrastructure, we present the WAS Control Center which is a deep tracing tool-set for 24×7 environments. It exploits the benefits of autonomic computing to lighten the costs of highly detailed system tracing on a J2EE application server. The WAS Control Center is helping us in the creation of performance models of the WebSphere application server.