Method and system for automated, static instrumentation for applications designed for execution in environments with restricted resources, like mobile devices or TV set top boxes

摘要

A system and method for automatic instrumentation of mobile applications is presented. Mobile applications are typically executed in mobile runtime environments or operating system that is restricted compared to their conventional counterparts. Those restrictions include features that allow one to examine and modify code of application during the runtime of the application. Those features that are used by instrumentation based monitoring systems dedicated for conventional applications are thus not available for the instrumentation of mobile application. The system and method allow automatic instrumentation in a static way, either by persistently placing instrumentation code into mobile applications or by persistently adapting mobile applications in a way to perform a static instrumentation on application startup. The instrumentation code is placed in generic, application independent library code, but provides measurement and context data that allows one to determine specific business logic functionality using the instrumented generic library code.