Measuring end-to-end performance of CORBA applications using a generic instrumentation approach

The Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA) is often used as backbone middleware for connecting critical business system components and for integrating legacy systems. Therefore, CORBA applications have to be managed in an efficient manner. The emerging trend of service level agreements and service level management requires the management of a system from an end-user's viewpoint, i.e., metrics like application response time and availability are key concerns. This requires a very fine-grained monitoring of the application in order to identify its performance-critical parts. This paper presents a new generic instrumentation approach for CORBA applications that enables the measurement of end-to-end performance characteristics. The measurements are very fine-grained, i.e., complex invocation hierarchies within object meshes can be monitored. The presented solution is based on portable interceptors and the application response measurement (ARM).