Overview of Spring Insight Development

Spring Insight uses a plug-in architecture to collect, correlate, and analyze performance metrics from your application and from different pieces of third-party software that work with the application. You can deploy a native application to a Spring Insight-enabled tc Runtime instance and see diagnostics immediately, without further instrumentation. Or, you can use the Spring Insight Development Kit to create plug-ins tailored to the needs of your application. The Developer Kit provides a copy of the source code for all plug-ins shipped with Spring Insight and includes a sample plug-in to use as a starting point for creating your own plug-in.

Use the Developer Kit to create plug-ins that extend Spring Insight functionality; for example:

Collect trace details such as Hibernate flush times or JSP render times.
Render custom HTML for an operation detail frame.
Analyze traces and produce new types of End Points, such as a JMS message queue.

Among the metrics that the core plug-ins collect are:

SQL statement capturing (jdbc plug-in)
MVC Controller calls (spring-web plug-in)
Grails controller calls (grails plug-in)

Note: The Spring Insight Developer Kit and supporting APIs are published under the Apache Software License, version 2.0. Other portions of Spring Insight, primarily the Trace repository and dashboard user interface, are licensed under the Pivotal EULA. Plug-in authors are free to license their plug-ins as they see fit.

Prerequisites for Installing the Spring Insight Developer Kit

Before you install the Spring Insight Developer Kit:

From the Pivotal tc Server product page, click Downloads. Install the Developer Edition of Pivotal tc Server. See Getting Started with tc Server.
Install Maven 2.0.10 or later (or a similar environment) and Java 6 or later.

Installing the Spring Insight Developer Kit

Download the Spring Insight Developer Kit from the SpringSource Community Web site. The name of the bundle is insight-developer-kit-version.zip.
Create a directory that will hold the Developer Kit files and unzip the downloaded file into it. For example:
```
$ mkdir ~/dev/insight-dev
$ cd ~/dev/insight-dev
$ unzip /path/to/insight-developer-kit-version.zip 
```
This creates a sub-directory called insight-developer-kit.

The Developer Kit installation consists of the following files:

samples/payme-insight-plugin
samples/payme-webapp
insight-plugins/annotation
insight-plugins/grails
insight-plugins/hibernate
insight-plugins/jdbc
insight-plugins/method-endpoint
insight-plugins/servlet
...

payme-insight-plugin is a sample plug-in for Spring Insight. It is a good template for writing new plug-ins.
payme-webapp is a simple web application that demonstrates the payme-insight-plugin capabilities.
insight-plugins/* are copies of the source code for the Spring Insight plug-ins that ship with the project; for the full list and a description of each of these plug-ins, see Core Plug-in Reference. The code is also a good reference for the variety of tasks that plug-ins can accomplish.