TxVis: Transaction Profiling and Visualisation Tool

About

TxVis is a prototype transaction profiling and visualisation tool for WildFly / JBoss EAP for highlighting possible performance issues with transactional applications.

TxVis is currently in an early prototype stage and only a small subset of planned features are available and the tool may not be stable.

Dependencies

The following dependencies must be satisfied before running the tool.

MySQL

A local MySQL server is required running on localhost with the default port of 3306 and needs to be configured with the following database and users:

A user: txvis with password: d8mmANpFJVQUXMtb which has ALL privileges on a database called txvis.

This can be created from the command line like so (note: leave root password blank if you have never set it before):

>mysql -u root -p <root password>
mysql> CREATE DATABASE txvis;
mysql> GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON txvis.* TO txvis@localhost IDENTIFIED BY 'd8mmANpFJVQUXMtb';

In order for MySQL to work with JBoss you will need to install the Connector/J MySQL JDBC driver this can be achieved by following these steps:

1. Download Connector/J from MySQL at: http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/connector/j/

2. Extract the archive and copy mysql-connector-java-[version]-bin.jar to $JBOSS_HOME/modules/com/mysql/main recursively creating the directories if they don't exist.

3. Copy module.xml from [project-root]/etc to the same directory as above; NOTE: if you downloaded a version of Connector/J other than 5.1.25 you will need to edit module.xml and update the resource-root path property to point to the correct connector/J jar file.

4. Add the following lines to your JBoss standalone.xml file:

    <driver name="MySqlXA" module="com.mysql">
    	<xa-datasource-class>com.mysql.jdbc.jdbc2.optional.MysqlXADataSource</xa-datasource-class>
    </driver>
   

This should be placed inside the <datasources><drivers> tags.

Maven

Maven 3+ should be installed and present in your OS's PATH environment variable.

commons-io-2.5-SNAPSHOT.jar

The commons-io 2.5-SNAPSHOT release is required as it contains a bug fix that is essential to the correct running of this tool. The snapshot release is not available from a central maven repository so a compiled jar is included in the [project root]/etc/lib directory.

This should be installed into your local maven repository using the shell script installdeps.sh available in the [project root]/etc/ directory:

Alternatively this can be installed by running the following maven command from the [project root]/etc/lib directory: mvn install:install-file -Dfile=commons-io-2.5-SNAPSHOT.jar -DgroupId=commons-io -DartifactId=commons-io -Dversion=2.5-SNAPSHOT -Dpackaging=jar

Running TxVis

A shell script is included in the project root folder to deploy and start txvis: deploy.sh the corresponding script undeploy.sh is included to shut it down.

The user interface can be accessed by pointing a browser at: http://localhost/txvis/