inspectIT 1.7 Release

Owned by Ivan Senic
Last updated: Oct 16, 2017
3 min read

The final stable version of the inspectIT 1.7 line is version 1.7.11.94 release on 19th May 2017. User documentation space for this version is Documentation 1.7.

Features overview 

Most important features of 1.7 line are:

  • Automatic remote tracing support for communication based on HTTP and JMS
  • Implementation of the opentracing.io API as part of the inspectit.agent.java.sdk project
  • Dynamic instrumentation support (update of the instrumentation points without need to restart the application)
  • UI based business context definition for defining applications and business transactions
  • Support for monitoring based on influxDB and Grafana
  • Alerting for long-term monitoring data stored in influxDB based on static thresholds
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Third party tools versions

Here are the versions of third party tools that you might want to integrate with inspectIT and that work with version 1.7.11

  • inspectIT supports influxDB in version 1.2.x
  • To show measurements from influxDB you can use Grafana in version 4.x

Upgrade guide

If you are updating from version 1.6.9 here is a summary of the upgrade guides related to all 1.7 versions:

How to install the new version?
  • Use the installers to install the new version. Best practice is to use a new folder for the installation and integrate the version of inspectIT into the folder name.
Necessary adaptions
  • 1.7.5 From this version inspectIT provides option to force creation of the MBean server. Thus, if you are monitoring the JMX attributes using inspectIT make sure that MBean server is created or forced by inspectIT. If the server is not created the monitoring of the attributes will not be possible, as simply inspectIT does not have where to read the data. 
  • 1.7.9  From version 1.7.9 inspectIT is compatible with influxDB version 1.2. You can freely update the version of influxDB in order to get latest features and bug fixes. inspectIT does not provide any guarantee that it's backward compatible with older influxDB versions.
  • 1.7.10 From version 1.7.10 dynamic instrumentation has been disabled by default on the IBM JVM due to the possible problems with re-transformation of classes. In addition after using class re-transformation on the IBM JVM, the JIT compilation is completely suspended by the JVM. Thus, it's advised not to use re-transformation with the IBM JVM. However, Environment configuration allows overriding of the default settings if needed. 
  • 1.7.11 Instrumentation configurations that have been exported with previous version of inspectIT will not work with the newest version. There is a need for a small manual adaptation:
    1. Open your exported .xml file
    2. Locate the schemaVersion attribute in one of the exported environments or profiles

    3. If attribute exists add the located attribute and it's value to the root XML element configuration-interface-import-data

      <configuration-interface-import-data schemaVersion="4">

  • 1.7.11 The key of the inspectIT tag header used in the load testing changed to inspectit_tag, thus update to load tests is necessary if you used tagging option. Note that this change enables tag propagation to all the JVMs that interact in the request coming from the load testing tool (based on new tracing support).
Things that will not work anymore
  • 1.7.3 From this version the inspectIT agent can only work with Java application run in the JVM version 1.6 or higher. If you run the JVM in the version 1.5 or lower, please do not update.
  • 1.7.4 The REST endpoint were restructured in this release, thus if you used inspectIT via REST you need to adapt the way you access the services.

Demo

The best way to try inspectIT 1.7 version is to use the Spring PetClinic Microservices sample application.