[DidYouKnow-41] Glowroot bundled with ServiceDesk Plus

Introduction: Glowroot is a simple APM (Application Performance Monitoring) tool useful for monitoring Java-based applications. It has a feature which allows tracing for slow requests and errors, it is also possible, logging trace time for every user action within the ServiceDesk Plus.

https://glowroot.org/

Glowroot is now bundled with ServiceDesk Plus and available from 11124 builds onwards.

Note: This tool is not enabled by default and need not be enabled until explicitly told so for performance monitoring by a ServiceDesk Plus developer, Glowroot can be very useful to find the root cause of application issues like slowness or general performance checks. However, keeping the Glowroot enabled for a long duration will lead to an unwanted increase in disk space on ServiceDesk Plus Server and it would be consuming the scarce performance-resources on the server as well in order to monitor. After collecting logs, the Glowroot needed to be disabled for regular use.

Data Deletion: Access the Glowroot from the application server by accessing URL http://localhost:4000 Goto Settings >> Administration >> Storage.

This would help reclaim the space lost due to logging from the Glowroot once the debugging is done.

Scroll to the end of the page and click Delete all data.

Steps to enable Glowroot:

Stop the ServiceDesk Plus service.
Uncomment the entry "wrapper.java.additional.*=-javaagent:../glowroot/glowroot.jar" in wrapper.conf [Manageengine\ServiceDesk\Conf ]
( for Windows) Uncomment the entry "set JAVA_OPTS=%JAVA_OPTS% -javaagent:"%SERVER_HOME%\glowroot\glowroot.jar"" in RUN.bat [Manageengine\ServiceDesk\Bin]
(for Linux) Uncomment the entry "JAVA_OPTS="$JAVA_OPTS -javaagent:$SERVER_HOME/glowroot/glowroot.jar"" in RUN.sh [Manageengine\ServiceDesk\Bin]
Start the ServiceDesk Plus service.
Live data collected can be viewed by accessing the URL http://localhost:4000 from the application server.

Note: By default, Glowroot can be accessed only from the localhost/server alone and not from your domain for security reasons.

ServiceDesk Plus Admins or IT Admins, who have access to the ServiceDesk Plus server can make use of Glowroot to analyze Network latency and Disk I/O latency related traces.

Network latency:

Under the Thread profile tab if you find traces with SocketRead state accounting for more than 10% it indicates possible network latency between the application and DB server.

Disk I/O latency:

Similarly, if you find more traces waiting at FileInputStream this would indicate possible disk I/O latency in the application server.

Hope that this clarifies the uses and the advantange of having Glowroot bundled into the application. However, it is an Important point to note that this a thirdparty-open-source application. And that we do not support issues or provide training on Glowroot itself. It is simply a method intended to be used for debugging issues that otherwise would be difficult.

If there are any further questions, please feel to reach out to us and do revisit us for more information on everything related to ServiceDesk Plus and ITSM.

Our previous article - Option given for requesters to select SLA on Service Request submission can be disabled