Application Response Measurement - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

Application Response Measurement (ARM) is an open standard published by the Open Group for monitoring and diagnosing performance bottlenecks within complex enterprise applications that use loosely-coupled

Loose coupling

In computing and systems design a loosely coupled system is one where each of its components has, or makes use of, little or no knowledge of the definitions of other separate components. The notion was introduced into organizational studies by Karl Weick...

designs or service-oriented architecture

Service-oriented architecture

In software engineering, a Service-Oriented Architecture is a set of principles and methodologies for designing and developing software in the form of interoperable services. These services are well-defined business functionalities that are built as software components that can be reused for...

s.

It includes an API for C

C (programming language)

C is a general-purpose computer programming language developed between 1969 and 1973 by Dennis Ritchie at the Bell Telephone Laboratories for use with the Unix operating system....

and Java

Java (programming language)

Java is a programming language originally developed by James Gosling at Sun Microsystems and released in 1995 as a core component of Sun Microsystems' Java platform. The language derives much of its syntax from C and C++ but has a simpler object model and fewer low-level facilities...

that allows timing information associated with each step in processing a transaction to be logged to a remote server for later analysis.

History

Version 1 of ARM was developed jointly by Tivoli Software

Tivoli Software

Tivoli Software is the service management brand of the IBM Software Group. IBM purchased Austin-based Tivoli Systems, Inc. on March 4, 1996 and allowed existing executive management to operate Tivoli as a wholly owned subsidiary in the IBM Software Group...

and Hewlett Packard in 1996. Version 2 was developed by an industry partnership (the ARM Working Group) and became available in December 1997 as an open standard approved by the Open Group. ARM 4.0 was released in 2003 and revised in 2004.

, ARM 4.1 version 1 is the latest version of the ARM standard.

Introduction

Current application design tends to be more complex and distributed over networks. This leads to new challenges in today's development and
monitoring tools to provide application developers, system- and application administrators with the information they need.

Within distributed applications it is not easy to estimate if the application performs well. The following issues help in the
evaluation of distributed applications:

Are business transactions succeeding and, if not, what is the cause of failure?
What is the response time of a transaction?
Where are the bottlenecks, which sub-transaction could cause a bottleneck?
Which and how many transactions are executed in an application?
How to tune an application or its environment to perform better?

ARM helps answer these questions.

Approach

The main approach of using ARM is:

Define business as well as technical transactions which are of interest.
Insert calls into the application to the ARM interface to measure these defined transactions.
Deploy the instrumented application in their normal environment with an installed ARM agent.
The used ARM implementation now provides the transaction measurements of interest.

ARM Application

Complex distributed applications usually consist of many different single applications (processes). In order to be able to understand the relationship between all single applications the concept of an ARM application is introduced with version 4.0 of the ARM standard. Each ARM transaction is executed exactly within one ARM application.

ARM Transaction

Transactions are the main concept of the ARM standard and represents a single performance measurement. A transaction definition defines the type (name) and additional attributes of an ARM transaction. A transaction can be executed (started and stopped) several times which results in multiple measurements. Each measurement has basic attributes like status of completion (good, failed, aborted), start- and stop timestamp, the resulting duration and the system address (host) it was executed on. Additionally special metrics or context properties can be associated with a transaction measurement.

ARM System Address

Uniquely defines a host by its name, IP address or other unique information.

ARM Correlator

ARM correlators are used to express a correlation between two ARM transactions. This is a synchronous relationship also known as parent-child relationship. Commonly, a parent transaction triggers a child transaction and only continues its execution when the child transaction has finished. Using correlators, it is possible to split a complex transaction into several nested child transactions, where each child transaction can have child transactions of its own. This results in a tree of transactions with the topmost parent transaction being the root of the tree.

ARM 4.1 defines asynchronous relationships to support data flow driven architectures.

ARM Metric

ARM Metrics can be used to get more information about the execution of a transaction. ARM defines a set of metric types for different purposes such as a counter, a gauge or just a numeric value.

ARM Properties

Properties are a set of so-called name/value pair strings which qualifies an ARM transaction or an ARM application beyond the
basic definition of these entities and allows to associate additional context information to each transaction measurement.

ARM Instrumented Applications

The following applications are already instrumented with ARM calls:

Apache HTTP Server
Apache HTTP Server
The Apache HTTP Server, commonly referred to as Apache , is web server software notable for playing a key role in the initial growth of the World Wide Web. In 2009 it became the first web server software to surpass the 100 million website milestone...

using the ARM 4.0 Modul mod_arm4. All HTTP requests are measured using ARM.
Mozilla Firefox
Mozilla Firefox
Mozilla Firefox is a free and open source web browser descended from the Mozilla Application Suite and managed by Mozilla Corporation. , Firefox is the second most widely used browser, with approximately 25% of worldwide usage share of web browsers...

using the ARM 4.0 XPCOM
XPCOM
XPCOM is a cross-platform component model from Mozilla. It is similar to Microsoft COM and CORBA. It has multiple language bindings and IDL descriptions so programmers can plug their custom functionality into the framework and connect it with other components.-The model:XPCOM is one of the main...

extension npARM.
IBM WebSphere
WebSphere
IBM WebSphere refers to a brand of computer software products in the genre of enterprise software known as "application and integration middleware". These software products are used by end-users to create applications and integrate applications with other applications...

Application server
Application server
An application server is a software framework that provides an environment in which applications can run, no matter what the applications are or what they do...

. Various requests like URI
Úri
Úriis a village and commune in the comitatus of Pest in Hungary....

, JSP
JavaServer Pages
JavaServer Pages is a Java technology that helps software developers serve dynamically generated web pages based on HTML, XML, or other document types...

and others are measured using ARM.
IBM HTTP Server .
IBM DB2
IBM DB2
The IBM DB2 Enterprise Server Edition is a relational model database server developed by IBM. It primarily runs on Unix , Linux, IBM i , z/OS and Windows servers. DB2 also powers the different IBM InfoSphere Warehouse editions...

Database Server .
SAS (software) supports ARM 2.0 a long time. With version 9.2 of its release it supports also ARM 4.0.
Baan
Baan
Baan was a vendor of enterprise resource planning software that is now owned by Infor Global Solutions.Baan or Baan ERP was also the name of the ERP product created by this company.-History:...

5 and Infor ERP Ln 6.1

External links

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