A transparent and centralized performance management service for CORBA based applications

The quest for service quality in enterprise applications is driving companies to profile their online performance. Application management tools come in handy to deliver the required diagnosis. However, distributed applications are hard to manage due to their complexity and geographical dispersion. To cope with this problem, this paper presents a Java based management solution for CORBA distributed applications. The solution combines XML, SNMP and portable interceptors to provide a nonintrusive performance management service. Components can be attached to client and server sides to monitor messages and gather data into a centralized database. A detailed analysis can then be performed to expose behavioral problems in specific parts of the application. Performance reports and charts are supplied through a Web console. A prototypical implementation was tested against two available ORB to assess functionality and interposed overhead.