This post would look into how to tackle and debug issues in scenarios where they only occur in production (or other remote environment) but not in development environment. As anybody who has been in this kind of situation would acknowledge, trying to pinpoint the cause of these kind of “issues” might quickly end up being a practice at taking shots in the dark: a very time-consuming and inefficient process.
It was this kind of situation I recently found myself, where, I had to rectify certain issues that were occurring in the production environment but could not be reproduced on the development machine.
Fortunately enough, the said issues could be reproduced in the testing environments (which is as close to the production environment as possible). But having the issues reproducible in the test environment was good In that it confirms the issues needed to be fixed, but it was of little help in actually tracking the issues down, finding the cause and fixing it. Relying just on log outputs was not enough…What if I could debug the test environment from my machine?
It was at this stage that I thought about remote debugging and if there exist the possibility of having an application run in a remote JVM and still be able to intercept its execution from the copy of the source code running on a local IDE: sounds just like what would get the job done.
And sure this is very possible. I looked into what is needed; the set up and all. It did not sound complicated. So, together with the help of a colleague, Thijs Schnitger, was able to get it up and running without much hassles.
This post thus describes the procedure of setting up the ability to remotely debug a JVM application from within an IDE. The post outlines the procedure using IntelliJ IDEA as the IDE, and the remote application to be debugged would be web application running on Tomcat. The steps outlined below should apply with any remote JVM application and any IDE, although the exact steps may differ, the general idea would remain same. The post also gives a brief overview of the technologies that makes remote debugging possible.
Read full article from How to Remotely Debug Application Running on Tomcat From Within Intellij IDEA « Trifork Blog / Trifork: Enterprise Java, Open Source, software solutions
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