RHQ Blogs
Last changed Feb 17, 2010 06:04 by Heiko W. Rupp
A video from the talk about "Systemmanagement with RHQ and Jopr" recorded at FOSDEM X is online. You can watch it either on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qGTtERJ63xw
Last changed Feb 09, 2010 10:04 by Heiko W. Rupp
A new video has been made available that explains how to start with agent plugin development.
Last changed Feb 09, 2010 05:14 by Heiko W. Rupp
I had the luck to give a talk about RHQ at FOSDEM X Read more...
Last changed Feb 01, 2010 17:44 by Jason Dobies
The release can be downloaded and full release notes found at the RHQ wiki.
Last changed Jan 18, 2010 08:32 by Greg Hinkle
Autocomplete is a feature that I can not live without. It must be the curse of using better and better IDEs and phones. Not that I'm too lazy to type out the rest of a command, but something drives me nuts about the inefficiency of having to do it when I could use that time to do something more useful. So when it came time to write the command line interface for RHQ last year I knew it was a feature we had to get in there somehow. [Read More...|http://www.jroller. …
Last changed Jan 04, 2010 02:36 by John Mazzitelli
I decided to revisit that Byteman prototype from a few months ago and build it out further. With this RHQ-Byteman integration, you can now do remote byte-code injection into any Java virtual machine. The uses for this kind of thing are boundless - from tracing how long it takes for a Java method to execute to testing an application's fault tolerance by forcing test exceptions to be thrown.
Last changed Dec 16, 2009 09:57 by Heiko W. Rupp
Last changed Dec 11, 2009 08:57 by Bryan Kearney
The RHQ team is proud to announce the first developer build of the RHQ 1.4.0 platform. This initial developer release, 1.4.0-B1, provides an early look at the new features which we are planning for the 1.4.0. This release contains many of the plugins which had been available as part of the Jopr project, along with the plugins that were included in previous RHQ releases. The message provides details on the release notes, how to download the release, …
Last changed Dec 08, 2009 13:36 by Heiko W. Rupp
I've added a plugin to the tree that allows monitoring via scripts written in Ruby.
Last changed Dec 05, 2009 13:38 by John Mazzitelli
RHQ is introducing a major new feature - server plugins. You now have access to the full breadth and depth of functionality that the core RHQ Server code has, without having to modify core code. Using server plugins, you can plug in your own management code to the RHQ Server, allowing you to add to the existing core management feature set. The ability to innovate new features and capabilities is now much easier. [Read more...|http://management-platform.blogspot. …
Last changed Nov 16, 2009 23:58 by Greg Hinkle
Updates to the RHQ and Jopr Project infrastructuresNovember, 16, 2009 Source RepositoriesThe RHQ and Jopr source repositories have been consolidated into a new GIT repository in order to facilitate more advanced distributed development and community involvment. The repository is now hosted on Fedorahosted at http://git.fedorahosted.org/git/rhq/rht.git?p=rhq/rhq.git …
Last changed Nov 09, 2009 11:05 by John Mazzitelli
I read Andrew Dinn's post on Byteman 1.1.1 and was very intrigued. I took a few hours to write up a quick Byteman RHQ plugin prototype. I recorded a Flash demo to show how it works.
Last changed Nov 06, 2009 19:31 by Greg Hinkle
August 27, 2009 Red Hat and Hyperic were the original collaborators and maintainers of the project and are now mutually terminating their agreement in conjunction with the project. This change in collaboration does not affect the RHQ project. Red Hat will be the ongoing maintainer of the project. Participation by Red Hat, …
Last changed Oct 27, 2009 00:49 by Heiko W. Rupp
Project RHQ, which is the foundation for Jopr will soon move all bug tracking from the old JIRA system at jira.rhq-project.org over to a bugzilla instance at Red Hat. Read more...
Last changed Oct 27, 2009 00:46 by Heiko W. Rupp
In the past it was often confusing to users that we have two source repositories for RHQ and Jopr. We have recently changed this. Read more...
Last changed Aug 03, 2009 05:26 by Heiko W. Rupp
I have committed support for sending alert notifications via Twitter into an experimental branch of Jopr and RHQ.
Last changed Jul 27, 2009 06:44 by Heiko W. Rupp
As you surely know, I am also active on Twitter as pilhuhn. So I have sat down and started to write a TwitStat plugin for Jopr to show the possibilities of the Jopr platform, that it is not exclusively about managing JBoss products (as some people say) and to show more example code. Read more...
Last changed Jun 28, 2009 00:04 by John Mazzitelli
Jopr has recently introduced an experimental feature that exposes your managed environment as a WebDAV repository. This means that you can use any WebDAV client to browse your managed environment as if it were a simple file system and peek into your resource hierarchy, obtaining information such as a resource's availability, its configuration and measurement trait data.
Last changed Jun 03, 2009 09:50 by Joseph Marques
Jopr now supports an embedded database option during installation (using H2 under the covers). This option, aside from preparing the embedded database, also configures an embedded agent running inside the same VM. This means it takes only a few keystrokes now to install an entire Jopr system, end-to-end. Read more here
Last changed Apr 22, 2009 15:02 by hrupp
I am just working on a plugin when I have some spare cycles (I will tell you which one in a few days
Last changed Apr 21, 2009 23:08 by John Mazzitelli
Jopr and Embedded Jopr. Aside from each having Jopr in the name, how are they related? How are they different? Why do these two projects exist? I'll try to explain that here....
Last changed Apr 20, 2009 13:28 by hrupp
When writing a Plugin for RHQ, JBoss ON and Jopr (or for completeness: Embedded Jopr, you will run into Generic types for ResourceComponent and ResourceDiscoveryComponent. And I am sure you have often wondered what the T in ResourceComponent<T> should be. Read more...
Last changed Mar 26, 2009 11:42 by John Mazzitelli
There are numerous advantages for having an abstract management platform that can handle different management facets for many different kinds of managed resources. One of these advantages is the ability to correlate and process information across all the different facets. Read more... In just an hour or two, I added a feature allowing you to enable log tracking for the agent itself. If you enable this feature, you can view the agent's log messages directly in the Jopr UI. This enables you to see what's going on inside an agent, and you can corrolate those log events with other types of changes happening to your agent (e.g. configuration changes, monitoring data, alerts, etc). Let me discuss some of the nice things this allows you to do. [Read more... … Yesterday I was talking at Rheinjug in Düsseldorf about RHQ, Jopr and JBoss ON. Sometimes it is necessary in RHQ-plugins to load resources when the plugin is loaded and more important to unload those when the plugin is unloaded from the plugin container. Mazz has recently added the PluginOverseer interface for exactly this purpose. Read more... Are you running Jopr, RHQ or JBoss ON 2 with Oracle and see the following warnings in the servers logfiles: ... XAException.XAER_RMERR ...
Last changed Mar 06, 2009 12:08 by Greg Hinkle
Earlier this week, the Jopr/RHQ team put out a new beta of our upcoming 2.2 release with some substantial new features. We have available a quick visual tour of the upcoming changes. The release includes bug fixes, performance enhancements, many new features and UI improvements.
Last changed Feb 28, 2009 22:59 by John Mazzitelli
A lot of work has been put into the next release of Jopr 2.2. Its not quite ready for GA release yet, but we are close to releasing an upcoming beta. To help whet your appetite (with the goal of getting you to try Jopr 2.2 beta when its released ), this page will show you just a small portion of the new Jopr UI - you will find it very different than what you are used to seeing. [More...|http://management-platform.blogspot. …
Last changed Feb 09, 2009 12:16 by John Mazzitelli
Jopr can alert you if something is physically wrong with your hardware that may cause it to malfunction, assuming your hardware can provide Jopr with relevent data.
Last changed Feb 05, 2009 07:31 by Joseph Marques
During my wanderings I've seen people try to solve this issue in a variety of ways...However, none of these solutions are complete in my opinion. All of them seem to ignore one completely obvious question - how do I redirect the user back to the LAST page they were on before the session timed out? Read more here I have been invited by two German Java user groups to talk about RHQ, Jopr and JBoss ON. The talks will be as following:
Last changed Feb 02, 2009 06:02 by hrupp
RHQ had since its inception the concept of Out-of-bounds (OOB) metrics. For the upcoming version of RHQ (or in svn HEAD) we revamped the system in a way that it calculates the OOB conditions from the hourly data table... Read more... When developing any sufficiently complex web application, there will come a time when you need to support forms that have multiple submit buttons that do different things... By default, the first button in the form is the handler for the enter key (as opposed to explicitly clicking on the button to execute the appropriate action). While it may seem like we're picking nits here, … Agent auto-update functionality has been completed. This provides the ability for an agent to automatically detect that it needs to be updated and does so without the need for manual intervention. And the cool thing about this is it is completely cross platform! As I wrote previously, I have written a plugin generator for Jopr, JBoss ON and RHQ, which is hosted in the RHQ source tree. Since the last posting, I have updated the generator a lot, so that it
Last changed Dec 16, 2008 04:06 by hrupp
I have written a simple generator that allows to generate plugin skeletons by answering some questions. The generator will afterwards try to generate the respective artifacts. I have added it to RHQ in version 2419. Of course it is also usable in Jopr and JBoss ON. Read more...
Last changed Dec 06, 2008 17:01 by John Mazzitelli
For small environments, you can take the agent distributions as-is, install them and individually set up each agent by answering the setup questions at startup. This can be tedious the more machines you have. It would be nice if you could bundle your own "golden distro", push them out to all your machines and with no additional configuration or manual setup required, have the agents "just work". [This is now possible, read how...|http://management-platform.blogspot. … A new feature has been added to trunk, a feature so interesting that it deserves its own blog. I am sure most security-conscious administrators configure their IT infrastructure in a very specific way and they do not want anyone going onto any machine and re-configuring the machine or any of its software components willy-nilly. In fact, if something is reconfigured outside of a business' normal change-control processes, I would think administrators would want to be notified about it. … I am very pleased to announce that Red Hat has published my plugin development series as white paper. This document got real formatting from the Red Hat creative team - and it is looking just great. Read more... Mazz has recently written code that the agent can use to auto-upgrade itself. This feature is also good for an initial agent install. Read more
Last changed Nov 21, 2008 10:04 by hrupp
Yesterday I've been talking about RHQ at the Swiss Java Users Group in Zürich. This was a good session with around 50 people. Read more...
Last changed Nov 11, 2008 01:09 by John Mazzitelli
My previous post explains how you can use the Hibernate plugin to manage your Hibernate applications with Jopr. In reality, the Hibernate plugin is just a customized JMX plugin because, after all, everything you do in relation to monitoring Hibernate is through its Hibernate Statistics MBean. So this begs the question, what if my own application has its own custom JMX MBeans? Can I use Jopr to manage and monitor those as well? [Find the answer here...|http://management-platform.blogspot. … A new feature has recently been added to RHQ/Jopr that allows you to monitor Hibernate running in any standalone J2SE virtual machine. This blog talks about how you can use the Jopr Hibernate plugin to do this. Now that we have introduced HA capabilities to RHQ, we expect to be able to support at least a few hundred agents within an RHQ ecosystem (if not more). But this poses a new challenge for us and our customers - how do we keep all of those agents up-to-date? Read more...
Last changed Nov 01, 2008 04:14 by hrupp
Ruth Suehle posted an Interview in Red Hat Magazine with our Chris Morgan on Jopr, Embedded Jopr, that build on RHQ. You can find the whole Interview here. My colleague Joseph recently wrote about cluster management in upcoming RHQ 1.2. Don't confuse this with the cluster work we have done for RHQ 1.1 Read more...
Last changed Oct 30, 2008 04:38 by hrupp
Fady had given a session on the Developers' Day at Gitex. The session was a 3 hours debate where ... Read more...
Last changed Oct 24, 2008 03:04 by Joseph Marques
...If you could aggregate your JBossAS instances into a cluster group, and then have logically clustered servers and services automatically grouped beneath that, you could navigate the resource hierarchy very quickly and efficiently... Read more here
Last changed Oct 21, 2008 08:51 by Joseph Marques
"...Configuration monitoring...[brings] the platform one step closer to being a complete, end-to-end management and monitoring solution for your enterprise..." Read more here Embedded Jopr (pronounced "jopper") is an exciting new open source project that has just been released by JBoss. In a nutshell, it's a web application that can be dropped into the deploy directory of a JBossAS 4.2.x instance to provide a user-friendly front end for administering the app server. Read more here. ...resources groups can actually be used as indirect tools for monitoring the health of your platforms, servers, and services... Read more here
Last changed Oct 17, 2008 13:37 by Greg Hinkle
Last changed Oct 16, 2008 03:22 by hrupp
JBoss Operations Network 2.1 has been released along with open sourcing further parts of it in Jopr. Read more...
Last changed Oct 15, 2008 20:01 by Joseph Marques
Running a successful project and putting out a successful software product that sells is much like organizing a dinner party... Read more here
Last changed Oct 14, 2008 11:40 by Joseph Marques
...we made providing a newer and better interface for group definitions / dynagroups a priority in the 1.1.0 release of RHQ. As a result, it was shipped with a wizard formally titled the Group Definition Expression Builder. Now when you create a new group definition (or edit an existing one) you'll see a little icon at the upper right-hand portion of the input box. Click it. You'll find it provides all of the familiar controls we should have started with in the first place: drop-down menus, …
Last changed Oct 14, 2008 07:57 by fmatar@redhat.com
I'll be giving a session about SOA & JON (JBoss Operations Network) at Gitex in Dubai on the 21st of October 08 between 01:00 PM and 04:00 Dubai's time. Read more... ...The new code took only 1/7 of the time the old code used to, used significantly less database resources, and decreased the number of roundtrips from tens of thousands to a few dozen...
Last changed Oct 13, 2008 15:48 by stanquinn
Having been around since the project's inception, I can say with confidence that the 1.1.0 release of RHQ is the most robust, stable, and scalable version we've delivered to date. The major focus of this release was to eliminate the single point of failure on the server-side. Read more...
Last changed Oct 13, 2008 15:53 by stanquinn
The RHQ code base has been tagged with the GA (General Availability) tag for release 1.1 and brings a lot of new features and improvements. Most notably this includes High Availability (HA) for the servers. Read more...
Last changed Oct 13, 2008 15:54 by stanquinn
Bela Ban from JBoss Clustering, Javagroups and JBoss Cache and I will give a presentation at the Java User Group Switzerland in Zürich Read more...
Last changed Oct 13, 2008 15:54 by stanquinn
We are now having a mailing list for commits to the RHQ code base Read more...
Last changed Oct 13, 2008 15:54 by stanquinn
When writing plugins for larger systems, they can get big and monolithic too. This short article shows how to decompose a big plugin into smaller ones. Read more... In this second (and last) part of the using a thermometer with RHQ and JBossON, I am guiding you through the plugin code. When starting this post I set the title to "Home automation with RHQ". But this would have been a little exaggerated at first and perhaps RHQ is - if you don't have other stuff to monitor and manage - like to break a butterfly on a wheel. But anyway a system like RHQ is (or will be) well suited to be the central brain of a home automation system. Of course, if I say RHQ, this applies to JBossON 2 as well. So lets start with measuring temperatures with the help of a digital thermometer chip. …
Last changed Aug 26, 2008 06:51 by hrupp
RHQ and JBossON allow you to monitor Apache servers through its apache plugin. We have official support via precompiled plugins for Linux and Windows and instructions in the JBossON wiki on how to compile this for other Unixoids. While Mac OS X is a Unixoid (under the covers I want to show here how to do that anyway While RHQ is focusing on providing specific resource types with specific operations and metrics on them, it is possible to just connect to any JMX server (actually that code is in SVN Head as of today). This example will show you how you could use this to e.g. monitor your Eclipse instance. We have started to bring High-Availability to the RHQ Server. While developing on RHQ I encountered several situations where things were slow. One starts to look at the code, add a few print statements here and there and tries to guess what it happening. Luckily there is a different sort of debugging help: Profilers [Read more...|http://javablogs.com/Jump.action? … Sometimes when you start the RHQ agent (on commandline), it will not proceed to the sending> prompt, but sit there and wait for something. This post will talk about some of the possibilities. In the realm of extremely early prototype I've started an RHQ plugin that is meant to provide monitoring for some useful aspects of hardware. It only does anything useful on linux with IBM hardware or if you have smartmontools installed. The idea will be to collect some standard hardware info in a common model that isn't specific to a certain hardware. When writing a plugin for RHQ, one has to write the plugin descriptor. While this is not complicated, it still leaves some room for errors. The good thing (but you will hate it, when you run into it) is that when deploying the plugin, its descriptor will be validated against the defining XML Schema - and errors will reported.
Last changed Jul 25, 2008 10:54 by Greg Hinkle
I've gone ahead and committed a new plugin for RHQ that provides monitoring of a Hudson continuous integration server. It's not a particularly complex plugin, but it gives a decent example of using JSON within a plugin.
Last changed Jul 21, 2008 02:59 by hrupp
Since I have created the SNMPtrapd plugin for RHQ, I have updated it with a lot of little features and corrections.
Last changed Jul 17, 2008 05:33 by hrupp
The JavaDoc for plugin-development related classes is online now. ... I mentioned in my last post that I had started working on integration with Augeas. Initially, it was just kinda slopped together to be shown off at Red Hat Summit. It got some good feedback, so in my downtime I've been working on cleaning up what we have. ...
Last changed Jul 08, 2008 13:48 by hrupp
I have just committed an experimental SNMP trapd plugin for RHQ. Currently it is only able to listen for V1 traps at a fixed address, but I am sure this will change This posting also shows how to handle events within RHQ plugins. In trying to find better ways to view large amounts of data I stumbled across a project called TreeViz that has some nice ways to render hierarchical data. I hooked a few of these up to RHQ to help show the availability of thousands of resources in a single snapshot. One I really like is the sunburst display. Yesterday I was at 11th Java Forum Stuttgart (JFS), a regional Java conference with 1100 attendees We just released RHQ Version 1.0.1 and JBossOn 2.0.1 in the wild. Both are bugfix releases and ... Yesterday we held a SIG-JBoss meeting in Stuttgart about RHQ. Attendance was not that great - mostly due to the second semi-final of the European Soccer Championship. RHQ has a powerful grouping feature: you can generate groups of resources (of compatible and mixed type).
Last changed Jun 24, 2008 09:03 by hrupp
When creating a database and database user for RHQ, Postgres knows two commands to create a user: create user and create role
Last changed Jun 23, 2008 05:08 by hrupp
The agents managing resources can (and will) live on a different system than the server. So sometimes the question arises when a resource is marked as unavailable if the resource itself is down - or the connection between agent and server. Do you know more or less than you think you do? RHQ and related acronyms. When writing a plugin, you have to do a few things (even if it is very easy in then as you can read in my developing a plugin series). Jay wrote a plugin skeleton generator that makes the task of writing plugins even easier. ...RHQ has had from the very first design session a rich, hierarchical model for resources. This hierarchy, specifically the parent-child relationships, rather precludes a complex authorization model. Instead, RHQ complements a flexible inventory with a more simplistic authorization scheme...
Last changed Jun 19, 2008 04:36 by hrupp
JBoss is providing a free trial version of JBoss ON 2, built on top of RHQ. The SIG-JBoss in the Stuttgart Java User Group will have a meeting on Thu 26th about RHQ. I will talk about RHQ and JBossON 2 in general and we will perhaps have a look at writing plugins. Bring your laptops with you. Autodiscovery of resources is running at regular intervals in RHQ. But sometimes you want to directly add a new managed resource like a freshly installed JBossAS server ...
Last changed Jun 17, 2008 08:51 by Jason Dobies
... But I also found the time to work on some black projects as well. Augeas is a Red Hat project, providing APIs for configuring various Linux based services, such as GRUB, /etc/hosts, and yum and apt repositories. Once the base Augeas connection was in place, I was able to pretty quickly add a number of these services to RHQ. ... Here's an interesting use case for DynaGroups. One customer might have a few dozen/hundred JBoss AS instances, but only a handful of them have a web app deployed called, say, "someapp.war". They want to know what set of expressions they could use to maintain a group of all appservers that have that webapp deployed. In RHQ and JBossON 2, that is built on top of RHQ, you have the possibility to graph metrics for (more or less) arbitrary time ranges. But sometimes the display is not moving and not showing any data that you'd expect to see.
Last changed Jun 16, 2008 04:59 by hrupp
Metric data that is gathered on the agents will be sent to the server and stored in the database. Now if you want to e.g. compare metrics from two different sources (e.g. the load of two JBossAS servers in a cluster), you can only make sense out of it when the metrics have been taken at the same time ....
Last changed Jun 11, 2008 12:51 by Greg Hinkle
I've checked in two more new RHQ plugins to publish. These are also in the experimental stage right now. There's an Oracle plugin with some basic monitoring and an OpenSSH plugin that also experiments with augeas for configuration management.
Last changed Jun 11, 2008 12:51 by Greg Hinkle
I finally got a chance to checkin a couple more plugins that I had been working on. The virt plugin uses libvirt to do a bit of xen monitoring and management. ...
Last changed May 29, 2008 02:22 by hrupp
The Stuttgart SIG-JBoss will hold a meeting on June 26th in the premises of Red Hat Germany. Topic for this meeting is a presentation of RHQ – and if we have time about how to write plugins. You can view the full announcement at the Stuttgart Java User Group page Please register as indicated in the announcement page – registration is free! I have a written a three part series on how to write a simple RHQ plugin. As an example scenario the plugin will try to reach a http server, see if the base URL is available and return the status code + the time it took to reach it. Part one talks about the structure of RHQ itself
Last changed May 08, 2008 08:39 by Jason Dobies
... So what do we have to show for it? To be honest, a lot. When I have to look back and work with our 1.4 release I feel cramped with its relative lack of features. Features aside, the entire 2.0 package feels considerably smoother, faster, and just plain cooler. ... |
To test the plugin I am using the Standalone Container where I have deployed my plugin, the JMX and the platform plugin. 
. The JFS featured 42 sessions in 6 parallel tracks in one day.