Performance analysis of application response measurement (ARM) version 2.0 measurement agent software implementations

Effective distributed application performance management infrastructures are based upon the collection and management of key performance metrics including resource utilization, workload and service measurements. Without application oriented transaction service measurements, the viability and long term usability of the client/server paradigm for mission critical applications is in question. The Application Response Measurement (ARM) Application Programming Interface (API) addresses this requirement by enabling the measurement of transaction level metrics, notably response time, for distributed applications through application code instrumentation. Version 2.0 of the ARM API includes the ability to measure and correlate response time components on different processors (i.e., clients and sewers). ARM Agents encompass the software components responsible for interception and processing of the ARM API calls including support for response time measurement, collection and communication. This paper introduces alternatives for several important design aspects of ARM agent software that are not specified in the ARM standards documents. In particular, we consider the architecture of ARM Agent software, correlator generation and communication, and ARM data storage. We propose, implement and analyze the performance of several alternative designs. This work provides an assessment of ARM instrumentation impact on application response times as well as insights into the design issues involved. We first provide a general overview of the ARM 2.0 API and features. We then consider alternative ARM agent software designs. Next, we present measurements results for several design implementations that shed light on the overhead involved with instrumentation and the developed designs. Finally, we present conclusions and a description of future work.