Summary
In this article, we have identified the major components that comprise a tuning environment:
Application-specific transactions
A load tester
An application server-monitoring component
An application-monitoring component
A platform-monitoring component
An external resource (for example, database) monitoring component
A correlater and analyzer
A presentation layer
And we have defined how these can work together to tune a J2EE environment. Some of this might still be fuzzy because we have not discussed what metrics to monitor and how to interpret them, but don't worry: That understanding is the purpose of this series of articles.
Finally, we looked at some of the commercial and open source offerings to help us tune our environment.