Technical Reports

Operating systems today provide the ability to monitor interactions between processes and libraries, but component frameworks, such as EJB (Enterprise Java Beans) and CORBA (Common Object Request Broker Architecture), cannot monitor interactions between components. As more applications are being developed using component frameworks, there is a need to enhance the set of tools available to developers. This paper describes a communication mechanism, called an out-of-band channel, which allows trace messages to be sent from EJB containers to a centralized monitoring entity. This channel enables new tools to be created which can monitor the run-time invocation relationships between EJB components and also trace the execution flow across components within an enterprise. A prototype architecture is presented along with a discussion of the unique challenges associated with monitoring components that are distributed across an enterprise.