Description of the Related Art
The growing presence of the Internet as well as other computer networks such as intranets and extranets has brought many new applications in e-commerce, education and other areas. Organizations increasingly rely on such applications to carry out their business or other objectives, and devote considerable resources to ensuring that the applications perform as expected. To this end, various application management techniques have been developed.
For example, application runtime data can be obtained which identifies individual software components that are invoked in the application. This approach can use agents that essentially live in the system being monitored. For example, an execution path, e.g., thread or process, can be traced to identify each component that is invoked as well as obtain runtime data such as the execution time of each component. Tracing refers to obtaining a detailed record, or trace, of the steps a computer program executes. One type of trace is a stack trace. Traces can be used as an aid in debugging.
Another approach involves monitoring traffic which is sent between a client and an application, for instance, such as requests and corresponding responses. This approach can be used to obtain information such as response times which characterizes a client's interaction with the application.
However, techniques are needed for facilitating the understanding of correlations between the traffic which is provided to an application, and the application runtime data which is generated by the application in response to the traffic.