Distributed Java Applications

This paper presents a new Java oriented monitoring infrastructure that enables tools to observe, analyze and manipulate the execution of distributed Java applications independent of implementation details like instrumentation of monitored entities, hardware platform and application libraries. Tools can access the monitored application via a standardized interface defined by an On-Line Monitoring Interface Specification (OMIS) and extended by a set of new Java-specific services relating to garbage collection, class loading, remote method invocation, etc. The new monitoring functionality can be applied for building various kinds of tools and for adapting the already existing ones, such as performance analyzers, debuggers, etc. , working in the on-line mode.