Plumbr 4.4: completing transition from troubleshooting to monitoring

We have been humbly quiet during our latest version upgrades. After all – when using any kind of software all you care is that it performs its duties you installed the software for in the first place. This time we reserved ourselves a right to brag, as we have changed several fundamental concepts in how Plumbr is packaged.

First and foremost, you now have access to the history of your JVMs. When previously you were able to get real-time overview of what was happening inside your JVM, then now you can go back to any moment in time to look for historical insights.

As a second major change, we have added locked thread detection to our main branch. Note that this functionality is still disabled for majority of our users. We expect to launch it during the forthcoming months,  but if you wish to get early access to lock contention detector, then apply for private beta membership. We keep rolling out this functionality to new accounts on weekly basis.

We have decoupled different problems Plumbr tracks in graphical user interface. When we started as a memory leak detector, we had no clue that we will discover so many more problems from within the JVM. Now with GC issues and locked threads in our monitoring arsenal, we needed a way to decouple all the features so that you can actually make sense of what Plumbr is trying to communicate to you.

Incidents triggered by Plumbr communicate more clearly about the underlying problems. Questions such as “What happened?”, “Where it happened?”, “When it happened?”, “Has it happened before?” “Should I deal with it?”, “Should I deal with it now?” are now easier to answer – we now bundle all this information together in the incident details so that people from the operations can quickly triage the incidents.

So, with the 4.4 release we complete our nine-months long transition from a troubleshooting tool to monitoring solution. By no means should our fellow developers be worried – the underlying concepts we build our product upon are still the same. Whatever problems we are after within the JVM, we either confirm the lack of the problem or surface the severity of the problem. After this we take you directly to the root cause, down to the single line in code or to the single configuration change you need to make. And if the issue is already known to us, we also equip you with the step-by-step solution guidelines from our knowledge base.

To take advantage of the new functionality, just log into our On Demand Plumbrand download the latest agent. Or, if you are a new user, just go ahead and sign up for the two week trial access. One note for our Hosted users – this functionality is not yet available in Hosted mode. Give us a bit more time to polish and test the functionality before rolling it out for Hosted installations as well.