Monitoring and Logging

Applications deployed on Fabric3 can take advantage of its built-in injection-based monitoring framework for logging and recording application events. The monitoring framework offers a number of benefits:

Strongly-typed monitoring interfaces and events
High performance logging (millions of events per second) with no garbage creation for latency-sensitive appications
Dynamic event level adjustment

Why Fabric3 Uses Its Own Monitor Implementation

You may be wondering why the Fabric3 Standalone and Tomcat runtimes use a proprietary monitor implementation as opposed to a third-party logging library. The reason is performance and excessive object creation. Many applications running on Fabric3 have very low latency requirements. This means that a monitoring solution must be capable of routing events extremely quickly (i.e. microsecond latencies to disk) without creating objects. The common third-party logging libraries we examined all suffered from thread contention and, more importantly, excessive object creation which leads to GC pauses under load. The Fabric3 monitor implementation can be configured to use the LMAX Disruptor to alleviate contention and avoid object creation altogether, resulting in stable operation with no GC (even minor collections) under load.

The Following sections cover the Fabric3 monitor framework.