Request metrics

The WebSphere Application Sever also provides a request metrics facility that allows you to track the processing time of transactions and key WAS components. Once enabled, the metrics can be sent to third-party monitoring agents like Application Response Measurement (ARM) agents, and can also be saved to log files.

ARM is an industry-standard API that is used to monitor the availability and performance of applications. This monitoring is done from the perspective of the application itself, so it reflects those units of work (transactions) that are important from the perspective of measurement. We cannot cover how third-party tools, such as IBM Tivoli Composite Application Manager for WebSphere, which use this information via ARM, do this, as it is beyond the scope of this book. However, we can describe how to configure WAS for products which use ARM.

Once enabled in WAS, the request metrics subsystem tracks individual transactions in a given piece of work, that is, a transaction...