Rapid problem resolution is a crucial factor in enabling IT shops to comply with today’s business-critical Service Level Agreements (SLAs). The AutoPilot Plug-in for JBoss closely monitors transaction activity in web applications, servlets, Enterprise Java Beans (EJBs) and web services within JBoss, including performance measurements, transaction pulls, database interactions and configuration changes. It instantly detects and isolates the root cause of response degradations and bottlenecks in real-time, greatly speeding resolution time to eliminate problems well before they impact run-time operations. AutoPilot produces this information in a graphical form for easy analysis. From a separate announcement, jKool monitors any application, whether in development or production, running in a J2EE environment. It gives you complete, click-by-click visibility into all of your J2EE and SOA applications. It gives you transaction level visibility with on-demand drill-down to the Java Message Service (JMS), Java Database Connectivity (JDBC), method calls and servlets to speed root cause identification. jKool breaks down the total execution time by each layer of an enterprise application - web, database, business logic - instantly revealing the source of any bottleneck with precision, even down the method call level. This enables instant isolation and rapid resolution of any performance-related problems. With jKool you can monitor all of your web-based application transaction flows in real time to eliminate performance and availability issues. jKool is available in personal, professional, and enterprise editions. The personal edition is a free download. The professional edition adds support for the WebLogic and WebSphere application servers; the enterprise edition integrates the AutoPilot graphical interface.

For another monitoring utility, have a look at MessAdmin. MessAdmin is a notification system and Session administration for J2EE Web Applications, giving detailed statistics and informations on any Web application. It installs as a plug-in to any Java EE WebApp, and requires zero-code modification.

While jKool looks similar to MessAdmin, jKool Enterprise offers rule based alerting and correlation capabilities, which are indispensable for application support folk running in production environments. So users can correlate metrics from j2ee, messaging, z/OS, enterprise service bus and custom built applications. The idea is to monitor the whole SOA (j2ee based) stack from a single point.

Nastel's AutoPilot together with jKool offers complete SOA (j2ee based) monitoring across a broad set of platforms. Check out http://www.nastel.com for more info on SOA solutions.

While jKool looks similar to MessAdmin, jKool Enterprise offers rule based alerting and correlation capabilities, which are indispensable for application support folk running in production environments. So users can correlate metrics from j2ee, messaging, z/OS, enterprise service bus and custom built applications. The idea is to monitor the whole SOA (j2ee based) stack from a single point.

Very true. jKool is more advanced that MessAdmin, as you guys have all the power of a full-time commercial offering. MessAdmin is an open-source solution, and mainly a one-man show at that. Nevertheless, I believe we both have our own strengths and weaknesses!