TECHNICAL FIELD

The present disclosure relates generally to computer systems, and, more particularly, to a framework for monitoring nanosecond-order application performance.

BACKGROUND

The Internet and the World Wide Web have enabled the proliferation of web services available for virtually all types of businesses. Due to the accompanying complexity of the infrastructure supporting the web services, it is becoming increasingly difficult to maintain the highest level of service performance and user experience to keep up with the increase in web services. For example, it can be challenging to piece together monitoring and logging data across disparate systems, tools, and layers in a network architecture. Moreover, even when data can be obtained, it is difficult to directly connect the chain of events and cause and effect.

Ultra-low latency (ULL) applications represent a specialized form of applications/services that have very strict requirements in terms of their execution latencies. Indeed, modern ULL applications, such as those used for High Frequency Trading (HFT), are now achieving latencies on the order of nanoseconds. In these and other ULL applications, speed is of utmost importance, with a single glitch potentially leading to a financial loss of potentially billions of dollars. Thus, application performance monitoring (APM) is vital, to ensure that the ULL application is performing as expected.

Unfortunately, APM for ULL applications is quite challenging, as any measuring of application performance will also impart additional overhead on the performance. In some cases, this can even cause the performance of the ULL application to become unacceptable.

