After the other day William’s comments, I decided to invest some more time in reading about JXInsight. So last night, I’ve started my look through their blogged documentation and put together everything that might get me started. Thinking that others may be facing the same issue as I was, I am listing here those entries that may get you some ideas about the product.
101
- Services (description of concepts)
- AspectJ(Usage and extensibility of JXInsight based on Aspectj)
- Introducing Diagnostics
Configuration
I have listed only the link for Tomcat as that is the configuration I was looking for, but it looks like the blog contains entries for other deployments too. There are a couple of more links that may be interesting, but they look a bit old: Apache Tomcat Monitoring and Configuring Servlet Traces.
My continued quest for information resulted in finding a couple of more pages, but I’ll have to filter them out firstly:
Concepts at work
What I am still looking for, and doesn’t look like being around, are the following pieces of documentation:
- Definition of the concepts
- Console details
- Terminal usage
I’ll probably ping William about these. So far I’ve been a bit puzzled by the terms the documentation is using. These are not clearly defined, and I think I am that kind of person that agrees with usability guru Steve Krug when thinking that you shouldn’t introduce new terms for existing concepts, as these are usually leading to confusion.
Last, but not least, I have noticed that JXInsight 5.5 was released and that William will focus on creating the so-needed documentation:
Now the hard part begins – rebuilding the documentation set! This will be ongoing for the next few weeks[…]
I am looking forward to seeing it.
Posted by: Alex Popescu (aka the_mindstorm)
mindstorms 
Hi Alex,
First off THANKS for taking sometime to pull together the links you think are relevant to newbies.
The User Guide (4.0) does provide a large amount of information regarding the many common visualizations that are still relevant in the current release though of course there are some new views and analysis modes.
Click to access UserGuide.pdf
The User Guide also does a pretty good job of describing the concepts and model underlying JXInsight Transact (JDBInsight) and there is also a chapter on the terminal which by the way has a built-in help system similar to unix commands.
There are two other sources of information not listed above – (1) the Java Doc for Probes, Diagnostics, and Trace (2) and the release notes which also includes information on the features added in each build.
Java Docs:
http://www.jinspired.com/products/jxinsight/api/
Release Notes:
http://forums.jinspired.com/viewforum.php?f=7
We have a lot documentation but the structure needs work especially in defining clear path for beginners.
Can you please tell me which particular concepts you believe are not defined sufficiently in the Java Doc or blog entries?
Kind regards,
William
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Thanks for adding the documentation. I may be using this product in regards to my next customer. I find lack of documentation very frustrating since some people are working to learn new technologies. Being productive with a new product is vital and I find it odd that any company would neglect telling its users how to use the application at a fundamental issues. Hopefully some good documentation will be forth comming. Mean while, I have a couple days to get up to speed with this product and I hope this documentation, and any other they add to the site will be helpful.
Thanks for aggregating it all in one location!!!
Tom,
To be factual there are more than a 100 blog entries posted showing various aspects of the product. The volume is significant the issue is structure. Important. Yes.
Its bests to think of JXInsight as 7-8 different software execution analysis tools rolled into one. This is how product management a JBoss/RedHat has recently viewed our offering.
Regards,
William
You are right William. It is not the quantity that is the problem. As I underlined it before, I do think that the most important think that is missing is the lack of a step by step intro to the product (or the so called Getting up to speed guide).
./alex
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.w( the_mindstorm )p.