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Evaluating Pinpoint APM (Part 3)

Having completed all of the steps described in the first two posts of this series you should be able to start and use Pinpoint. To test that everything is working fine you can use the testapp web application which is part of its quickstart bundle.
For this purpose you could start the collector and the web UI from the quickstart as well:

%PINPOINT_HOME%\quickstart\bin\start-collector.cmd
%PINPOINT_HOME%\quickstart\bin\start-web.cmd

Then start the testapp application:

%PINPOINT_HOME%\quickstart\bin\start-testapp.cmd

Check that everything is fine connecting to the web UIs:
    Pinpoint Web - http://localhost:28080
    TestApp - http://localhost:28081

Start to do some actions in the testapp application and see through the web UI which information are sent to Pinpoint.
Now you can profile any Java web and standalone application of yours. You need to download the agent jar in any location in the application hosting machine. Then, for standalone applications, you need to run them adding the following arguments for the JVM:

-javaagent:%PINPOINT_HOME%\quickstart\agent\target\pinpoint-agent\pinpoint-bootstrap-1.6.1-SNAPSHOT.jar -Dpinpoint.agentId=myapp-agent -Dpinpoint.applicationName=myapps 

where:
  • javaagent is is the location of the agent jar;
  • agentId is is a unique name that identifies the application instance;
  • applicationName is the name to group application instances as a single service.
The same JVM arguments should be added to the CATALINA_OPTS variable in the Tomcat startup script (cataline.bat or catalina.sh):

CATALINA_OPTS="$CATALINA_OPTS -javaagent:$AGENT_PATH/pinpoint-bootstrap-$VERSION.jar"
CATALINA_OPTS="$CATALINA_OPTS -Dpinpoint.agentId=$AGENT_ID"
CATALINA_OPTS="$CATALINA_OPTS -Dpinpoint.applicationName=$APPLICATION_NAME"

What's next

In the next posts we will have a detailed look at the Pinpoint internal model and how to implement a custom plugin using the available Java APIs.
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