Introduction

The Sun ONE Application suite offers a comprehensive list of products for Internet infrastructures, i.e., web server, middleware application server, LDAP server, messaging server, and identity server, that are used in many domains such as banking, trading, healthcare, and logistics to support mission-critical services. IT infrastructures based on the Sun ONE Application suite follow the popular multi-tier architecture wherein the web server functions as the front-end receiving client requests, the application server hosts the business logic components, the identity server manages user policies, the directory server handles access rights and other user information lookups, and the database server stores and retrieves application data.

Routine monitoring of the infrastructure including the network, system, and application is imperative to ensure that the infrastructure functions at peak performance at all times. Since each Sun ONE application performs a different, specialized function, the monitoring has to be specific to each application – e.g., is the mail server delivering emails? is the application server’s heap effectively sized?. More importantly, since the different Sun ONE applications inter-operate to support the end-user service, it is critical that the monitoring system track the inter-dependencies between applications in order to pin-point the exact source of a performance bottleneck in the infrastructure.