Viewing trace interactions

The visualization of host and process interactions in the Sequence Diagram views of the Profiling and Logging Perspective helps in workload administration of distributed applications. The representation of time in these views helps in determining bottlenecks in application performance as well as network communication.

Prerequisites:

• Launching or attaching to an application

The sequence diagram views provide a number of actions that can be performed to easily view interactions.

• Opening sequence diagram interactions view
• Opening diagram overview
• Navigating lifelines and messages
• Collapsing and expanding lifelines
• Collapsing and expanding messages
• Viewing time intervals
• Zooming in and zooming out

Opening sequence diagram interactions view

To open a sequence diagram interaction view, follow these steps:

1. Select the monitor that represents the application cluster in the Profiling Monitor view.
2. Right click, then select Open With  and select interaction diagram type that you want to view. The Sequence Diagram view opens and shows entities that correspond to the monitoring level selected.

Please go to Monitoring levels and corresponding views to see which interaction diagrams are available for a selected monitoring levels.

Opening diagram overview

For large views where scrolling is required, the overview can be used to navigate to and from different pages within the sequence diagram.
To open the sequence diagram overview, click on the button at the right-hand corner of the view. The sequence diagram overview is displayed.

Navigating lifelines and messages

For views with multiple pages, there are several methods of navigation available.

• Navigation menu item
  1. From the toolbar drop-down menu, select Navigation. A navigation sub-menu is displayed.
  2. Select one of the navigation options.
• Pages menu item
  1. From the toolbar drop-down menu, select Pages. The Sequence Diagram Pagesdialog box opens
  2. Type the page number that you want to go to. Click OK. The view refreshes with the target page.
• From the toolbar or from the toolbar drop-down menu, navigate using the Go to next page and Go to previous page buttons.
• Go to message
  1. Select a message. Right click to bring up the context menu.
  2. To view to the return of a method call, select Go to message return from the context menu.
  3. To view to the start of a method call, select Go to message from the context menu.

Collapsing and expanding lifelines

Collapsing and expanding lifelines can be used to hide or expand sections of data within a view.

Collapsing lifelines

1. While pressing the CTRL key, click on the lifelines that you want to collapse.
2. Right click to bring up the context menu.
3. Select Collapse selected classes or objects. The view refreshes with the selected lifelines merged together in one lifeline. The collapsed lifeline is indicated by this icon .

Expanding lifelines

1. Click on the collapsed lifeline that you want to expand. To view the full name of the lifeline, hover the mouse over the lifeline.
2. Right click to bring up the context menu.
3. Select Expand selected lifeline. The view refreshes with the selected lifeline expanded.

Note: Object or Class Interactions only

Collapsing and Expanding messages

Collapsing and expanding messages can be used to hide or show all method calls invoked from a selected method.

Collapsing messages

1. Click on a message within the sequence diagram.
2. Right click to bring up the context menu.
3. Select Collapse invoked methods. The sequence diagram refreshses hiding all method calls within the selected method. The collapsed message is indicated by this icon .

Expanding messages

1. Click on a collapsed message within the sequence diagram.
2. Right click to bring up the context menu.
3. Select Expand invoked methods. The sequence diagram refreshes showing all method calls invoked from the selected method.

Note: Object or Class Interactions only

Viewing time intervals

The relative amount of time spent between two consecutive method calls or returns can be viewed by hovering the mouse over the timeline on the left-hand side of the diagram.

.

Zooming in and zooming out

To return the view to the default display size (reset zoom factor), to zoom in, or to zoom out, use this set of toolbar controls. .

Related concepts
Overview of the Log Analyzer
Log file correlation
Log interactions view
Log thread interactions view

Related tasks
Working with log files
Synchronizing time

Related reference
Monitoring levels and corresponding views
Sequence Diagram controls
Lifeline categories

(C) Copyright IBM Corporation 2000, 2004. All Rights Reserved.