Patent ID: 7506315

Claim:
A method for tracing program flow within an application server comprising: performing the following before loading classfiles of application components for processing at runtime: identifying the application components to be traced within the application server; modifying bytecode associated with the identified application components, the modifications associated with a particular set of methods of the application components related to program execution across application servers, databases and/or external systems; performing the following at runtime: loading the respective classfiles of the identified application components, the loading including identifying the names and methods of the respective classfiles with a dispatcher; executing the identified application components, the executing including dispatching method invocations to respective plug-ins; with the plug-ins, registering the method invocations and method-related information associated with the particular set of methods; and translating the method-related information to a format employed within a distributed statistical records (“DSR”) system and forwarding the translated information to the DSR system.