Ron Bodkin's Blog

Glassbox 2.0 automated troubleshooter Goes Beta

I'm pleased to announce that we just shipped the Beta release of the open source Glassbox 2.0 automated troubleshooter. Glassbox 2.0 is a major step forward in simplifying troubleshooting enterprise Java, just deploy it to your app server and it discovers your existing applications and automatically diagnoses problems. Glassbox provides a concise analysis of what’s wrong, focusing on relevant information like excessive queries, or parameters that cause failures.

Glassbox now offers an AJAX Web Client, improved analysis and an automated installer that makes it easy to monitor Java applications in either a standalone or clustered environment.  Under the hood, Glassbox continues to improve its monitoring and analysis to more easily pinpoint problems, Glassbox monitors selectively to allow very low overhead data capture, and we have been working with the AspectJ project to significantly reduce memory and startup time overhead. Glassbox is all open source with our CVS repository now hosted at SourceForge.

Please try it and let us know what you think.

We’d enjoy showing you in person, too. We’re presenting Glassbox this fall at:

• Software Development Best Practices Sept. 12 in Boston
• Google on Sept. 25 (to be available on Google Video afterwards)
• Bay Area Software Symposium Oct. 13-15 in San Jose
• The AJAX Experience Oct. 23-25 in Boston
• The Colorado Software Summit Oct. 23-27 in Keystone
• Rocky Mountain Software Symposium Nov. 10-12 in Denver

Glassbox Troubleshooter & Inspector 1.0 Released

We just announced the 1.0 Release of the Glassbox Troubleshooter product and the Glassbox Inspector project. The Glassbox Troubleshooter builds on the Glassbox Inspector’s AspectJ and JMX monitoring technology. The Troubleshooter adds root cause analysis and a focused GUI client that dramatically simplifies the process of Java troubleshooting. Our goal is to winnow down most of the common performance and reliability problems in enterprise development, providing a concise summary of what is wrong with supporting evidence to make it clear. The product is free to try, and we’d love your feedback! I see the product as especially helpful for finding problems in production and when integration or system testing code. See the screen shot below for an example of the kind of information it provides. You can also learn more at http://www.glassbox.com

Just last week, I had a great experience working with a manged service provider where they were able to download, install, run the product and get valuable information about their application in a QA environment in less than half a day (and half of the time was spent figuring out how to uninstall another monitoring product!).

p.s. Stay tuned for more about designing the next releases.