Pru Becomes Smooth (Java) Operator

By: Richard Karpinski,InternetWeek.com

Despite its power, enterprise Java presents some significant challenges to IT shops that have committed to the development platform. For Prudential Financial, which has made Java its middle-tier programming standard, one of the biggest hurdles was that the tooling around Java—especially diagnostic and performance management tools—was much less robust than the company was used to dealing with in its legacy environments.

The way Newark, NJ-based Prudential has set up its IT organization—with separate groups handling development, application hosting, enterprise management, and Internet infrastructure—it became even more important to be able to pinpoint problems within its growing number of Java applications quickly and precisely.

Indeed, without a "stethoscope of some sort, it was very difficult to peel back the layers on Java and figure out exactly what was going on" with its code and applications, says Andrew Caprio, systems architect for Prudential's Corporate Technology Services division, which is responsible for keeping applications up and running for the company's business units.

For Prudential, the answer was to look for a performance monitoring tool that could help it keep tabs on its Java apps. Caprio and his team began looking for answers in October 2000.

Thanks to a referral from IBM (Armonk, NY-Prudential's vendor of choice for middle-tier hardware and application server software) Caprio eventually discovered Burlingame, CA-based Wily Technology, whose Introscope tool seemed to fit the bill.

Prudential started working with Wily about a year ago. The goal wasn't to do a one-off installation but to create a company standard that would impact all Java development work. Initially, Caprio wasn't sure the tool would work well in Prudential's distributed IT environment, where business unit developers hand off "wrappered" code for deployment by his group. But the Introscope tool includes an "auto-probe" feature that automatically scopes out Java code when it is loaded. So the new tool could fit almost seamlessly into Prudential's existing development processes.

"Our model is that every application runs in its own Java virtual machine," says Caprio. With Introscope, "as soon as it gets loaded in the class loader, it gets probed by the Wily tool. We've rolled this out carefully so every application is fully instrumented in staging and production."

Introscope installs a diagnostic agent on a server virtual machine. The agent sits inside the application platform at run-time and collects and reports data on application performance, both the performance of the Java code but perhaps more importantly how it connects to and integrates with other systems.

Goal: Fine-Tune Apps

Caprio emphasizes Pru was never facing major Java code or application problems.The goal was to fine-tune Java applications—both at the development stage and at run-time. "We knew the real benefit would come once we'd gotten all the development groups convinced of and indoctrinated in the value of monitoring app performance."

Introscope lets Prudential find problems earlier in the production cycle, as well as develop baseline tests to better understand overall application performance. It also can catch and solve problems that can save time and money.

For instance, one application needed to scale to support 1,500 concurrent users across two servers, but was stuck handling just 300 users per box. Using Introscope's custom method-tracing feature, testers found a JDBC database call that was slowing down performance. It was fixed and the app met its performance requirement.

This article originally appeared in InternetWeek.com, a sister resource of Insurance & Technology.

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CASE STUDY CLOSEUP

COMPANY:
Prudential Financial, Newark, NJ, $590 billion, total assets under mgt.

LINES OF BUSINESS:
Life, auto, homeowners, long-term care, employee benefits, retirement and estate planning.

VENDOR/TECHNOLOGY:
Wily Technology's (Burlingame, CA) Introscope performance monitoring tool.

CHALLENGE:
Pinpoint problems in a growing number of Java applications .