Guidance on Using NTA to Track a Complex EAR with Multiple XA Datasources and JTA Transactions

[xfocus]

Hello Narayana Community,

I am currently deploying and exploring the Narayana Transaction Analyser (NTA) to monitor and debug XA transactions in a complex application scenario. My environment consists of:

1. JBoss EAP 7 running a large EAR application.
2. The EAR includes multiple XA datasources configured for distributed transactions.
3. JTA is enabled and heavily utilized for coordinating transactions across these datasources.

My goal is to use NTA to:

• Track distributed XA transactions and analyze their lifecycle (start, commit, rollback, etc.).
• Diagnose issues like transaction timeouts, partial commits, or heuristic outcomes.
• Gain detailed insights into the behavior of transactions spanning multiple XA resources.

Questions:

1. How can I best configure NTA and JBoss to effectively capture and analyze such a complex transaction landscape?
   • Are there specific NTA settings or log configurations recommended for this use case?
2. For EAR deployments with multiple modules (e.g., EJBs, WARs), does NTA automatically consolidate and visualize transaction data across all modules, or is additional configuration needed?
3. Are there any known best practices or troubleshooting tips for ensuring that XA transaction details from all datasources appear correctly in NTA?

Any guidance, tips, or references to similar setups would be greatly appreciated. Thank you for your support!

Looking forward to your insights.

Best regards,

[Manuel Finelli]

Hi there, the Narayana Transaction Analyser (NTA) is outdated, and we are considering dropping support for it, i.e. marking the repository as read-only. However, if the community is interested in the project and users are happy to work on it, the Narayana team is happy to help :-)

[xfocus]

what is the classes and method responsible for locking tables?

and if  Narayana Transaction Analyser (NTA) is outdated what is the alternative you have for jboss 7 EAP?

[Manuel Finelli]

We don't have any alternatives for EAP 7.x. However, I suppose that NTA can still be reworked for EAP 7.x and EAP 8.x. If you'd like to give it a try, please let us know, and we can help if you get stuck.