+1 for JProbe

We were doing some performance analysis recently of our application. The application is distributed across a central J2EE AS component, with satellite nodes running under Tomcat connecting to the central J2EE server.

We used JProbe to collect the baseline performance data and locate the hot spots. I have all positive to say about this product. I was focused on the Tomcat part, but the people who used it on the J2EE side also spoke well of it.

For Tomcat, setup was a breeze. It was all simple click through wizards. JProbe has a built in Tomcat module and it works great for Tomcat 5. The setup worked properly the first time I ran it.

The stats it collected were right on. They provided all the data I was looking for. The results were presented in a useful way that allowed me to see the key summary parts while also being able to drill down to the level of detail I needed.

At one point I wanted to focus on CPU utilization in the remote Tomcat servers. I was able to easily reconfigure my JProbe session to measure CPU usage instead of default clock time. It worked just great and quickly isolated some key areas. The areas it found were not the sections we thought were problematic. So JProbe saved us a lot of effort.