Reviews : JInspired JDBInsight 3.0 Early Access :

Review: JInspired JDBInsight 3.0 Early Access (JXInsight)

by Drew Falkman

Introduction

JDBInsight consists of two pieces: the console and the server. The server will monitor your J2EE application, and the console will report and graph the results through an easy-to-read presentation (see Figure 1). At it's core, JDBInsight is simply a wrapper to the JDBC drivers accessing your database. When a JDBInsight driver is first instantiated, it will initialize the server or agent component. The agent can then be plugged into the console and the real-time results can be monitored and snapshots of the data stored for future analysis.

Where JDBInsight really diverges from other profiling tools is that it does not simply show what methods are called and classes are instantiated, but it also shows what specifically is going on between the application and the database. Just knowing that query method was called and was slow doesn't provide a lot of help for developers and administrators trying to isolate such issues. Let's take a look at JDBInsight in more detail.

Installation and Setup

• Windows NT/2000/XP
• Sun Solaris
• Linux
• HP-UX
• IBM AIX (new in 3.0)
• Apple OS X (new in 3.0)

In addition, JDBInsight works with the following application servers:

• Tomcat
• Jetty
• Resin
• BEA WebLogic
• IBM Websphere
• Bortland App Server/Enterprise Server
• Oracle AS
• Sun One
• JBoss
• Pramati
• According to JInspired, will work with any application server to some degree.

The following enterprise RDBMS platforms are supported:

• Oracle
• MS SQL Server
• Sybase
• IBM DB2
• Any JDBC-compliant database

Installation of JDBInsight on Windows is as straightforward it should be. Though it looks to be the same in other environments as well I only installed it on Windows. However, setup is a bit more of a story. Depending on your application server and RDBMS, you will need to change the JDBC driver to correspond with the JDBInsight driver instead of whatever driver you are currently using. This is generally done using an XML descriptor file, check your application server docs for details. A word of caution: the JDBInsight documents (as of EA 8) show numerous examples of using their Oracle driver, but you will have to figure it out yourself for others. That having been said, once that is configured, you have everything you need to start analyzing your applications.

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