NoRedef Agent - enable NIO metrics

Products

• CA Application Performance Management (APM / Wily / Introscope)

Issue/Introduction

 

Due to a large number of metrics in the environment the NoRedef agent configuration is used

However, there is a need to have the NIO metrics which are not collected by the NoRedef agent.

Is there a way to customize NoRedef agent to enable monitoring NIO for example by adding proper .pbl?

 

Environment

Any DX Agent release.

Cause

 

The NoRedef agent disables a number of things to avoid potential performance issues, sometimes seen where monitoring applications running in IBM JDK.

NIO classes are part of the Java Platform, system classes beginning with java.* and such classes require bootstrap instrumentation to be enabled.

The NoRedef configuration disables bootstrap class instrumentation as it relies on class redefinition / class retransformation, which are disabled in that version of the agent.

Resolution

 

As such the NoRedef configuration cannot be used to instrument NIO classes but some of the options in NoRedef profile can be used which may reduce metrics through reduced instrumentation:

introscope.autoprobe.deepinheritance.enabled=false

introscope.agent.deep.entrypoint.enabled=false

introscope.agent.deep.automatic.backend.detection=false

introscope.autoprobe.dynamicinstrument.enabled=false