Transaction Monitoring and Visualisation

ACID Transactions are routinely used when applications require strong guarantees as to how atomic operations, involving multiple resources, will perform in the presence of failures, such as system crashes and network disruption. Transactional middleware such as JBoss, combined with application frameworks like Java EE provide the developer with a simple means to add transactional semantics to their applications. Problems can still arise, however, for example poor transactional throughput may manifest when a high volume of transactions rollback, which can have a myriad of non obvious causes. This talk will explore the current methods of troubleshooting some common transactional issues using JBoss and introduce TxVis: a prototype transaction profiling and visualisation tool. We will discuss the challenges of its development and how it will aid the user in profiling the performance of transactions in their software and quickly isolate some commonly occurring problems.