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Evaluating Pinpoint APM (Part 1)

I started a journey evaluating Open Source alternatives to commercial New Relic and AppDynamics tools to check if some is really ready to be used in a production environment. One cross-platform Application Performance Management (APM) tool that particularly caught my attention is Pinpoint. The current release supports mostly Java applications and JEE application servers and provides support also for the most popular OS and commercial relational databases. APIs are available to implement new plugins to support specific systems. Pinpoint has been modeled after Google Dapper and promises to install agents without changing a single line of code and mininal impact (about 3% increase in resource usage) on applications performance.
Pinpoint is licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0.

Architecture

Pinpoint has three main components:
 - The collector: it receives monitoring data from the profiled applications. It stores those information in HBase.
 - The web UI: the front-end to consume the (real-time or historical) monitoring data stored in HBase.
 - The agent: it has to be attached to the Java applications that need to be profiled.
The figure below shows the high level architecture diagram of Pinpoint.



Web UI

The Pinpoint web UI home page provides a visual server map to understand the topology of monitored distributed systems, a real-time active thread chart and a request/response scatter chart. The figure below shows the web UI home page layout.








Other features provided by the web UI are the callstack view to have code-level visibility of every transaction and the inspector view to have further details about Memory usage, Garbage Collection, CPU usage, Thread performance and other JVM related stuff.

Building the source code

The first part of this series covers the build of the components starting from the source code. Pinpoint supports Java 6 and later releases, but I was interested only in Java 8: for this reason I needed to do some changes to the project modules POM files that I am going to describe in this post.
The prerequisites to build are:
 - JDK 8
 - Maven 3.2.x+ (I am using Maven 3.3.9)
 - A Git client
 - The JAVA_8_HOME environment variable set to the JDK 8 home directory
The pinpoint release I am referring to is the latest one (1.6.1) at the moment this blog post is written.
First of all clone the project repo from GitHub:
 git clone https://github.com/naver/pinpoint.git
Move to the project root directory:
 cd pinpoint
Edit the root POM file and make the following 2 changes:
1) In the properties sections modify the <jdk.home>${env.JAVA_6_HOME}</jdk.home> line referring to the JAVA_8_HOME env variable: <jdk.home>${env.JAVA_8_HOME}</jdk.home>
2) In the maven-enforcer-plugin rules section comment the references to the mandatory variables JAVA_6_HOME and JAVA_7_HOME:
    <!--<requireEnvironmentVariable>
        <variableName>JAVA_6_HOME</variableName>
    </requireEnvironmentVariable>
    <requireEnvironmentVariable>
        <variableName>JAVA_7_HOME</variableName>
    </requireEnvironmentVariable>-->
Before running the build, do a similar replacement as for the root POM file (use the JAVA_8_HOME env variable rather than JAVA_7_HOME in the properties section) to the third-party/google-guava, commons-hbase, commons-server, profiler-optional-jdk6, profiler-optional-jdk7, bootstrap-core-optional, collector and web modules.
Exclude the Animal sniffer plugin in the root POM in order to successfully build the collector module.
Finally run Maven to build everything:
 mvn install -Dmaven.test.skip=true

Next steps

In the next post we will see how to install HBase and how to configure it for Pinpoint.
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Comments

  1. UnknownMay 30, 2017 at 2:54 PM

    I have problems while installing pinpoint in windows. I am confused with the directory structure used in this process. I am using 'C' drive. Please tell me exact structure. Thanks in advance.

    ReplyDelete
  2. GooglielmoMay 30, 2017 at 4:02 PM

    If you cloned the GitHub project from C: then your pinpoint project root folder should be C:\pinpoint. The POM file to edit is in that location.

    ReplyDelete
  3. UnknownApril 10, 2018 at 7:23 AM

    I think JDK 6 7 8 is all needed to build the source code refering to the homepage(https://naver.github.io/pinpoint/installation.html)

    ReplyDelete

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