Narayana Transaction Analyser 1.0.0.Alpha1

In a previous post I introduced the Narayana Transaction Analyser (NTA). In that post I focused on the high-level goals of the project and provided some insight into where we hope to take this tooling. In this post I will focus on what features we have today in the 1.0.0.Alpha1 release and how to get started. I'll also close with an overview of what we hope to add in the coming releases.

Overview of Features in 1.0.0.Alpha1

The main set of features in this release are as follows:

• A simple getting started experience. Drop the .ear file into WildFly or EAP 6.2.0's deployments directory and click "start" in the Transaction Analyser's console, to begin analysis.
• Detailed information on JTA transactions. This includes the outcome of the transaction; which resources were enlisted and how they behaved.
• Demonstrator application. You may want to try out this tooling, but you don't currently have a misbehaving application to try it with. This demonstrator allows you to trigger various successful and unsuccessful transaction scenarios, on-demand.

Getting Started

Currently NTA supports WildFly 8.0.0.CR1 and EAP 6.2.0 onwards. To install and enable NTA do the following:

1. Download NTA from here.
2. Copy the nta-full.ear file to $JBOSS_HOME/standalone/deployments/
3. Start the application server, if not already started.
4. Visit the console here: http://localhost:8080/nta
5. Click start in the top-right of the console to enable analysis.

If you want to simulate some failing transactions, simply deploy our demo application and trigger some scenarios:

1. Download the demo.war from here.
2. Copy the demo.war file to $JBOSS_HOME/standalone/deployments/
3. Visit the demo application here: http://localhost:8080/txdemo
4. You will see a list of four scenarios. Click on invoke for the scenario of interest.
5. Switch to the NTA console and observe the details of the transaction.
6. Click on the transaction ID link to view more details of the transaction.

Example detecting a timeout

In this section I'll show how a timed-out transaction can be detected. I'll also use this as an opportunity to highlight some of the additional information that can be viewed with the tool.

Visit the console and click 'start' to begin analysis.

Open the demo application and  click on "Invoke" for the "2) Transaction Timeout" scenario. After two seconds, an alert will pop-up displaying the (failed) outcome of the transaction. 

Now switch back to the NTA console. You will see a single transaction listed. Notice that the status is 'TIMEOUT' and that the duration was a little over 1 second. This is understandable as the scenario set the transaction timeout to 1 second, whilst the business logic took 2 seconds to complete before attempting to commit the transaction.

Clicking on the TransactionID of the timed-out transaction takes you to a details page. Here we can see:

1) Transaction Information. This area provides high-level details about the transaction, such as the outcome (timeout, in this case), details of the duration and start/stop time as well as a note on wether it was distributed.

2) Enlisted Participants. This area lists information on all the participants enlisted in the transaction and how they behaved. In this example, the transaction was timed-out before the two phase protocol was begun. Therefore, the participants were never asked to prepare. The console reports the Vote as UNKNOWN. This text is a bit misleading and will be improved (see: NTA-39).

3) Event Timeline. This area provides a list of interesting events that occurred during the transaction. In this example we can see when the transaction was begun and then what participants were enlisted. The ABORT event occurs in response to the transaction timeout. This will be improved to make it clearer that the transaction was aborted here due to timeout (see: NTA-40).

Clicking on the other scenarios and observing the outcome in NTA is left as an exercise to the reader.

Upcoming Features

We are community-driven in prioritising features, so please provide feedback on the Narayana forums after you've tried the tool. The current set of features planned for the next few releases are as follows:

1) Distributed Transaction support. Alex Creasy (the intern who developed the prototype) has implemented support for analysing distributed (JTS) transactions. With the 1.0.0.Alpha1 release manual setup is required. In the Alpha2 release we hope to polish this process making it a lot simpler to use.

2) Plugin support. Alex also implemented support for simple plugins that detect common transactional issues. This feature requires a little polish and is currently un-documented. We hope to resolve this in the Alpha2 or Alpha3 release.

3) Closer integration with the WildFly and JBoss ecosystem. Currently NTA is a standalone tool. Over the coming releases we aim to align and integrate this tooling more closely with the existing tooling provided by WildFly and JBoss EAP. We are currently seeking community input on how best to achieve this.

4) Import/export of data. This allows the gathered data to be transferred to a third party who's helping to diagnose an issue. For example, when requesting support via a forum post or support ticket. This is currently targeted for the Alpha2 or Alpha3 release.

We also have lots of other features planned. For a more complete list (and up-to-date roadmap), visit the NTA Jira instance.

Getting Involved

• Install NTA and run the demo.
• Request support and provide feedback via the Narayana Forum
• Subscribe to this blog for the latest news.
• Track and report issues through the NTA Jira instance
• View and contribute to the source code on GitHub.

What to do if NTA doesn't display what you expect

NTA is currently Alpha quality, so it's possible that it won't always display the correct information. If you suspect this to be the case it would be great to hear from you, so that we can fix the issue. In this case, you should create a post on the Narayana forum. It would be great if you could provide a screen-shot of what NTA is displaying, as well as the server log file (if it's not too large). NTA parses this log file, so we should be able to compare this to the screen-shot when figuring out the problem. We can also use NTA to parse this log file making it easy to reproduce your issue.