WebMon: A performance profiler for web transactions

We describe WebMon, a tool for correlated, transaction-oriented performance monitoring of web services. Data collected with WebMon can be analyzed from a variety of perspectives: business, client, transaction, or systems. Maintainers of web services can use such analysis to better understand and manage the performance of their services. Moreover WebMon´s data will enable the construction of more accurate performance prediction models for web services. Current web logging techniques create a log file per server making it difficult to correlate data from log files with respect to a given transaction. Additionally, data about the quality of service perceived by the client is missing entirely. WebMon overcomes these limitations by providing heterogenous instrumentation sensors and HTTP cookie-based correlators. In this paper, we present the design and implementation of of WebMon and our experience in applying WebMon to an HP Library web service