Glassbox has announced the release of Troubleshooter, a monitoring tool designed to pinpoint problems commonly seen in Java applications. Troubleshooter is designed to provide you with a concise diagnosis that will be understandable even if you haven’t seen a single line of the applications code.

Glassbox Troubleshooter is a value add product that is written on top of the open source application, Glassox Inspector. The root-cause analysis capabilities that it has added to Inspector eliminates the need to troll through log files looking for abnormalities. Troubleshooter is built around a knowledge of common failure causes--for example, slow SQL, Java thread contention, or web service connectivity problems. It spots them automatically and describes them in plain English.

Off the rack configuration is capable of finding;

• Slow database queries
• Database connection failure
• Broken database query
• Failing Java
• Slow Java
• Bottleneck or thread contention
• Slow or Failing web service
• Inneficient Java code
• Slow or Failing remote procedure call
• Faulty HTTP
• Java Mail Issues
• Broken FTP

Key features:

• Diagnose problems with one click.
• No need to understand the code
• Concise English output ends miscommunication and fingerpointing
• Low overhead won't slow down production applications
• Plug and play. Up in minutes on any app with no source or build changes needed

A free trial version is avaliable at Glassbox.

So how does it do with Weblogic or Websphere with 40+ EJBs deployed, a healthy does of JSF or Struts and Tiles components and Web services running? Does it fall over? Hang? I would be surprised if it didn't do one or the other.

Does it use AOP and dynamic bytecode modification to instrument apps? Price?

Seriously folks...get a clue and put up screenshots or a demo of this thing in action. Most people won't even bother to try it without it. Given how common this complaint is on this site, you would think vendors would learn...

I followed two hyperlinks and got to screenshots at https://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/java/library/j-aopwork10/

Perhaps it is not the vendors fault that people don't read the information provided to them.

...and no I have no affiliation to the company, just a reasonable understanding that different people want different types of information

I followed two hyperlinks and got to screenshots at https://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/java/library/j-aopwork10/Perhaps it is not the vendors fault that people don't read the information provided to them....and no I have no affiliation to the company, just a reasonable understanding that different people want different types of information

Those are screenshots of JConsole.

So the bit in the article about the Glassbox inspector architecture exposing itself via JMX means?

We appreciate the comments, and the screenshot request is an excellent one. You'll find screenshots of both the Troubleshooter and the Inspector at http://www.glassbox.com/glassbox/Products.do.

The Troubleshooter works with many application frameworks and containers. We've tuned its code discovery for several popular frameworks, including struts. We're happy to offer advice on customizing it for other ones on our forum, and we're working directly with companies that have specialized troubleshooting and monitoring requirements.