Installation Guide

This guide helps you setup inspectIT with your system to be diagnosed.

Upgrading

No backward compatibility guaranteed

inspectIT releases do not offer any backward compatibility whatsoever.

  • Install the new CMR, agent and UI release
  • The old database of the CMR might not work with the new CMR release
  • Using different versions for the client and server might pose problems

Requirements

The following requirements are necessary in order to install inspectIT

Component

Requirement

Agent

  • Java 1.5 or higher (Java 1.4 is only supported with inspectIT up to 1.3 - there is still a release of this version if you for some reasons need to analyze Java 1.4 applications)
  • Supported platforms:
    • Sun JDK
    • IBM JDK
    • Bea JRockit support is dependent on the version of the JVM

CMR

  • The bundled Java 7 is required (inspectIT download already packages the Java version)
  • Suitable amount of Memory for the in-memory Buffer (for small single user environments 500MB might be appropriate)
  • 250 MB hard disc space for the installation files of inspectIT
  • Suitable amount of disc space for longtime storages (for starters 5GB might suffice)

  • Supported OS: 
    • Any platform that can run Java applications
    • Bundled Java version included for Linux and Windows.

UI

  • The bundled Java 7 is required (inspectIT download already packages the Java version)
  • Supported OS:
    • Linux 
    • Windows
    • Mac OS

Installing the CMR

The CMR is the central repository for the measurements collected by the inspectIT agent. This component is also responsible for storing the data and for aggregating and transforming the data for the user analysis. Thus the system should have enough memory (Sizing the CMR heapsize) and enough CPU power.

Installing the CMR on the same machine as the system that should be analyzed can pose problems. The problem is, that the CMR uses system resources that otherwise could be used to run the application and thus reduces the possible performance of the application. For best measurements the CMR should be installed on a separate machine. For diagnosis in an development environment installing the CMR on the same computer is possible. The agent communicates to the CMR by means of RMI. As the communication between the agent and the server might be quite high, it is also best to choose a machine for the CMR that is "near" (in terms of network) to the application itself.

Installation process:

  1. Download the CMR release
  2. Extract the CMR release
  3. The CMR release automatically provides start scripts for linux and windows that can be directly used

Installing the UI

  1. Unzip the release archive
  2. Start the inspectIT start script (provided for linux and windows)

Installing the inspectIT agent

The inspectIT agent integrates in the JVM of the system under diagnosis. This integration is done using JVM startup options. Depending on the used java version the integration is slightly different:

Java version

Integration

1.4

java [...] -Xbootclasspath/p:[YOUR_PATH_TO]/inspectit-agent.jar -Dinspectit.config=[YOUR_PATH_TO_CONFIG] [...]

5 and higher

java [...] -javaagent:[YOUR_PATH_TO]/inspectit-agent.jar -Dinspectit.config=[YOUR_PATH_TO_CONFIG] [...]

[YOUR_PATH_TO] = This is the Directory where the agent ist installed. 

[YOUR_PATH_TO_CONFIG] = This is the Directory which includes your inspectit-agent.cfg file. Wrong: D:\inspectit_agent\config\inspectit-agent.cfg, Korrekt: D:\inspectit_agent\config\

Do not refer to the inspectit-javaagent.jar

Note that you refer to the agent.jar archive by means of the javaagent option, do not refer to the inspectit-javaagent.jar. The inspectit-javaagent.jar only provides the implementation of the javaagent, the agent.jar also provides all additional classes and dependencies the agent needs.

The inspectIT documentation provides a best practice documentation of how to integrate inspectIT with different application servers and platforms. Please have a look if your environment is listed here for a quick start: