Request Tracing

The tracing of requests allows you to find slow requests and analyze where those requests spend time (e.g., on which internal or external system a request spends time or is waiting).

Engine Cockpit

You can activate and analyze the request tracing in the Slow Requests view of the Engine Cockpit.

Logging

If you experience poor performance, you can log the individual requests to the Axon Ivy Engine log by setting the level of the request performance logger in [engineDir]/configuration/log4j2.xml:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<Configuration>
   <Loggers>
    <!-- logs the start and the end of a request -->
    <Logger name="ch.ivyteam.ivy.performance.request" level="all" />
  </Loggers>
</Configuration>

This will create a log entry when the request has been received by the internal web server and when the request has been processed with the time spent for processing.

A unique request identifier requestId is assigned to every request. This can be used to find out what the Axon Ivy Engine did while processing the request.

Example:

[2020-09-15 11:17:29.621][DEBUG][ch.ivyteam.ivy.performance.request][http-nio-8080-exec-10]{requestId=61}
Entry url=http://localhost:8080/system/ client=127.0.0.1 session=4 httpsession=71902C0036745F320CAAD55AFA85A281
[2020-09-15 11:17:29.630][DEBUG][ch.ivyteam.ivy.db][http-nio-8080-exec-10]{requestId=61, client=127.0.0.1, executionContext=SYSTEM}
Execute database statement SELECT * FROM IWA_ACCESSCONTROL 
[2020-09-15 11:17:29.630][DEBUG][ch.ivyteam.ivy.db][http-nio-8080-exec-10]{requestId=61, client=127.0.0.1, executionContext=SYSTEM}
Executed database statement successfully in 0 milli seconds 
[2020-09-15 11:17:29.637][DEBUG][ch.ivyteam.ivy.performance.request][http-nio-8080-exec-10]{requestId=61}
Exit url=http://localhost:8080/system/ client=127.0.0.1 session=4 httpsession=71902C0036745F320CAAD55AFA85A281 took 16ms

The example above shows the log messages when the request with id 61 has entered and exited the web server. During the request a database SELECT statement has been executed. The whole request has been processed in 16 ms.

Request Tracing Tools

You can use a external tracing tool that propagates a trace id in a HTTP header. In that case, Axon Ivy will re-use the given trace Id as its requestId. This allows you to aggregate log entries from different systems using the requestId. Axon Ivy Engine supports the following HTTP headers:

HTTP Header	Tool/Standard
traceparent	W3C Trace Context
uber-trace-id	Jaeger
b3	Zipkin
X-B3-TraceId	Zipkin
X-Amzn-Trace-Id	Amazon X-Ray
ot-tracer-traceid	Open Tracing

For a deeper integration with a tracing tool have a look at our Jaeger Tracing (Jaeger and OpenTelemetry) example.