Health Center API Starter Tutorial

Have you ever encountered an application server hang without a clear reason or a Java application has become unresponsive? Is your application out of memory or running poorly? With Health Center, you can solve these problems more easily.

Using Health Center to monitor and diagnose problems

Health Center is an IBM monitoring and diagnostics tool for Java and is a free low-cost diagnostic tool and API for monitoring applications running on the IBM Java virtual machine (JVM). With Health Center, you can identify problems and help resolve problems by providing information to quickly assess the state of a running Java application. You can:

Determine if there is a native or heap memory leak

Discover which methods need to use longer run times

Determining I/O bottlenecks

Visualize and tune the garbage collection

View all lock contentions

To parse the WebSphere real time event for an exception

Monitoring the application's thread activity

Detecting deadlock Conditions

Collecting histogram data for a class

The latest version of Health Center is a powerful new API that you can use to write your own monitoring tools. An era of troubling difficulties in finding problems is almost over.

In this article, we'll learn to write a monitoring tool for checking application deadlock conditions, and then apply these principles to write more in-depth tools, query all issues from garbage collection activities to method analysis, and determine where the application spends its CPU cycles.

System Requirements

The Health Center API package requires at least the Eclipse 3.4 or Eclipse 4.x installation.

Installing an API package into Eclipse

IBM Monitoring and diagnostics tools are typically installed in the IBM Support Assistant (ISA) to embed Health Center in your application and encode it using the API, and you first need to install it into your Eclipse environment. To do this, follow these steps:

Start the Eclipse development environment.

Go to help-> Install New Software.

Add the ISA update site as a new site.

Click Add.

Enter the ISA Update Web site in the Name box.

Enter this url:http://public.dhe.ibm.com/software/isa/isa410/production/in the position box. This action initiates a search for all available tools, which may take several minutes.

Enter Health Center in the search box.

Select the package Health Center Core Feature and click Next (see Figure 1):

Figure 1. List of available software that will be installed

Confirm installation details and click Next.

Read and accept the license terms, and then click Finish. These steps will install the Health Center core functionality into your Eclipse IDE. You are ready to encode this API.

Confirm installation details and click Next.