Reference Pattern View

Slices and Workspaces

Jinsight How-To Guide

Filtering & Grouping with Slices · Using Multiple Workspaces

This final section of the tour gives a quick look at user-defined slices and workspaces. Using these features you can specify criteria to filter out irrelevant information, and to group the information you are interested in into your own units for analysis.

Unlike the other sections in the tour, this section is not a hands-on tutorial. Rather, we show a few screen shots to demonstrate some of the capabilities that slices and workspaces offer.

Filtering and Grouping with Slices

A slice is a subset of the trace information you may define to study an aspect of your execution that interests you. A workspace lets you set up a number of slices and then open views that make use of them.

You can filter out extraneous information from your study by using the workspace base slice. This is a slice that limits the information that will appear in every view of the workspace. You can further group this information any way you like by creating subset slices, and then use these groupings in various ways in each of the views.

In the examples below we show a transaction processing application, where we have set up the slices as follows:

Below is a sampling of views showing just some of the ways these slices may be used. (We assume here that the slices have already been created. To learn how to create slices, see Slices and Workspaces: Introduction in the Jinsight Reference Manual.)

The first view shows a summary of time spent in each type of transaction.

The next example uses the Execution view, colored by slice, to see when each type of transaction is occurring.

Next we show how we can measure the time each package spends on each type of transaction. We use a Table view where each row represents a package and each column a slice.

Using Multiple Workspaces

You may set up more than one workspace, to analyze different parts of a run simultaneously, or to analyze the same part using different organizational schemes. The example below shows the same view in two different workspaces, with slices set up to bring out different aspects of the information. The first breaks the activity down by transaction type, the second by database queries vs. updates.

Activity colored by slice, with one slice per type of transaction.

Activity colored by slice, where slices are database queries (blue) vs. updates (green), against a base of all transaction processing (dark gray).

See the Jinsight Reference Manual, starting with the section Slices and Workspaces: Introduction, to learn about all the capabilities provided by slices and workspaces.