LivePerf

I recently tried out LivePerf, an application performance monitoring tool that works well for distributed applications across a variety of architectures and operating systems. One of the standout features is the ability to monitor database performance, application servers, operating systems, and network connections in one centralized location.

LivePerf also offers an integrated view over heterogeneous networks. This means that you can maintain a consistent view across vendors, operating systems, and application versions. Regardless of where the data is coming from, it is always available in the same graphical console and can be plotted using standard or custom controls.

If you need to track business-specific metrics along with system performance, LivePerf allows you to extend the tool with your own data collectors. For example, you can extract custom data from SQL queries, Java applications, and command line tools.

Customization is a key strength of LivePerf, and this includes the ability to create your own custom views. If raw counters aren't providing the information you need, you can add, subtract, average or write a Java function to transform data before displaying it on the screen. This enables you to create statistics over time or display live data in your own charts.

Another powerful feature of LivePerf is its log and replay capability. You can record monitoring sessions and replay them at a later time to analyze the data in more detail.

Finally, LivePerf comes with built-in monitoring capabilities for numerous systems and applications, including Websphere, Weblogic, JBoss, SQL Server, DB2, Oracle, Unix, Windows, Apache, LDAP, SNMP, web applications, and application log files. Overall, I found LivePerf to be a comprehensive and powerful application performance monitoring tool suitable for a wide variety of use cases.