Discussing how RHQ can help in implementing ITIL Service Support for better web application management.

Discussing some of the new dashboard customization capabilities of RHQ 4.x. that allows the user to better display what matters most to their use case with portlets.

Discussing some of the challenges of IE support in RHQ 4.0.1.... SmartGWT IE7, IE8 Support

RHQ 4.0.1 has been released as bug fix release over RHQ 4 and brings support for Internet Explorer 7 and 8.
It also contains a fix for a memory leak and some apache related fixes.

You can learn more from the release notes, that also contain the download link.

RHQ 4 allows (as a hidden feature) to alert on call time data. This was contributed by Frank Brüseke some time ago. To enable Read more...

After ten month of hard work, RHQ 4 has been released. Read more about this release in the release notes, where you can also find a link to the downloads.

Hello,
we have just released the release candidate for RHQ 4

You can find the release notes (please, read them at http://rhq-project.org/display/RHQ/Release+Notes+4.0+CR
The release notes also contain a download link.

Please grab the release, test it and give us all feedback you can give.

HRQ 4 beta 1 has been released. Go to the release notes page for changes and the download link.

In RHQ 4.0.0.Beta1 we added the ability to have a CLI script executed as an alert notification.

Read about this new powerful feature here.

RHQ has the ability to invoke operations on any resource when it triggers alerts. When you combine this with the ability of the Script plugin to run remote scripts, you have a very powerful mechanism to integrate your own processes and rules to help correct or workaround abnormal conditions that occur in your managed environment.

[Read more...|http://management-platform.blogspot. …

JBoss is hosting a free webinar "Overview over RHQ and JBoss Operations Network" on wednesday 2/2.
To see more details and to register visit the JBoss webinars page

Some links around RHQ have accumulated over the last few weeks [Read more ...]

Some plugins like the postgres one require access to files that usually only the specific user or root have access to. Even if the agent does not do any harm, many admins do not feel comfortable running the agent as root. This posting shows how to use access control lists as alternative .

Yesterday I was able to attend the first day of the European PostgreSQL conference, PGDay.EU  [read more ...]

Profiling a web application for performance bottlenecks requires a balance between focusing on the minutia and taking a step back and looking at the bigger picture. Since nearly all software projects deal with time constraints, a team must wisely choose where to spend its efforts tweaking an application to yield the best experience for its end users.

However, before diving into the code looking for optimizations, …

C2B2 is doing a free workshop on JBoss Operations Network, the downstream of RHQ in London on Dec 14th.

For more details please visit their web site .

I've just posted a new RHQ tab sweep . that contains a lot of links around RHQ. Check it out :)

I've uploaded a new video recording from JUDCon 2010 in Berlin to Vimeo: Overview of RHQ 3 . This video contains parts of the live session I've given in Berlin. The video is also listed on the videos page in this wiki.

I've just made the (slightly edited) video from my JUDCon Berlin 2010 session "Writing plugins for RHQ and the JBoss AS admin console" available. You can find it along with links to a lot of other material on the videos page in this wiki.

I have just pushed a contribution by Steve Millidge to master: Steve overhauled our MySQL plugin big time and it now auto discovers the database, users and tables and gathers lots of metrics on those plugins.

Check it out (from source) and test it.

I had the luck to attend JUDCon Berlin and have posted a small review about it. [Read more ... ]

I've posted a small review of the JBoss OneDayTalk 2010 in Munich last friday.

The review also contains a link to my slides. Read the review

A new blog post on dealing with asynchronous workflows in the CLI. This article describes a common pattern used in RHQ and then considers what impact that this can have on the CLI.

John Sanda has written a cool blog post called Dealing with asynchronous workflows in the CLI

Lukáš Krejčí has written two blog posts about how to extract data from DB using a JPA model and using this data to set up TestNG tests

John Sanda has written an article that explains how to update the metric collection schedules via the RHQ CLI

Read the article

John Sanda has written two articles about the RHQ cli:

• Utility Functions for the CLI
• Auto import resources via CLI

Jay Shaughnessy explains in his article how to use the CLI to create and distribute bundles:

• [Scripted provisioning with RHQ 3 and JON 2.4|http://jayshaughnessy.blogspot. …

Search was developed to enable users to gain deeper insight, more quickly, into their enterprise by supporting a sophisticated method of querying system state.

read more...

A few weeks ago I noticed that the coregui module of RHQ, which is the next generation web interface written in GWT (SmartGWT to be precise), started to have its compilation slow down…noticeably. Not only did the overall time to compile the module increase, but during the build my box seemed to more or less locked up. Even mouse gestures were choppy. So…I decided to investigate.

read more...

After several month of hard work, Release 3 of RHQ has been released. Read more...

For the second in the series I've uploaded a demo of the latest prototype dashboard system for the next generation RHQ user interface.

Read More...

Alexander Kiefer started working on supporting the Nagios monitoring system from within RHQ. The idea here is not to plugin the Nagios plugins directly into RHQ, but [Read more... ]

To continue the discussion on our use of GWT for RHQ I wanted to explain our success in directly utilizing the domain objects of RHQ in our client side code. With GWT allowing us to write our UI view code directly in Java there's even more advantage in direct access than with some of our other client technologies. …

For the next version of RHQ we have been prototyping with the GWT UI technologies that I hope will improve the capability and usability of the RHQ project. The development is still in early stages and we're planning to roll out the new UI technology over the course of several releases along with the other major feature development.

[Read More and see a screencast...|http://www.jroller. …

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
or download is as .ogg file from the FOSDEM video page at
[http://video.fosdem.org/2010/devrooms/jboss/systems.management.with.rhq.and.jopr.ogg|http://video.fosdem.org/2010/devrooms/jboss/systems.management.with.rhq.and.jopr. …

A new video has been made available that explains how to start with agent plugin development.
You can check it out on youtube ( 3 parts )

I had the luck to give a talk about RHQ at FOSDEM X Read more...

The release can be downloaded and full release notes found at the RHQ wiki.

Read More...

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. …

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.

Read more...

I've written two posts that show you how to write an alert sender plugin.
You'll find the posts here:
Part 1 and Part 2

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, …

I've added a plugin to the tree that allows monitoring via scripts written in Ruby.
More...

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. …

Updates to the RHQ and Jopr Project infrastructures

November, 16, 2009

Source Repositories

The 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/?p=rhq/rhq.git

…

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.

Read more

August 27, 2009
We would like to update the RHQ community on a change in relationship between Red Hat Inc. and Hyperic Inc. as it pertains to the RHQ project.

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, …

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...

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...

I have committed support for sending alert notifications via Twitter into an experimental branch of Jopr and RHQ.

Read more...

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...

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.

Read more...

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

I am just working on a plugin when I have some spare cycles (I will tell you which one in a few days To test the plugin I am using the Standalone Container where I have deployed my plugin, the JMX and the platform plugin. Read more...

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....

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...

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.
Read more...

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 ...

Read more...

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.

Read More...

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. …

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.

Read more...

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:

• JUG Karlsruhe: 11th March
• Rhein-JUG, Düsseldorf: 19th March
  Read more...

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!

Read more...

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
is now also able to generate embedded child servers/services and also supports most of the entries in the plugin descriptor. Read more...

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...

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

Jean Deruelle of Mobicents reports that "Mobicents got a shiny new administration console" which is based on Jopr and RHQ.

Jean is happy how easy it was to develop the console with the work from RHQ.

You can read more on his blog. The console itself is described here.

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...

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...

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...

Fady had given a session on the Developers' Day at Gitex. The session was a 3 hours debate where ... Read more...

...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

"...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

I am pleased to announce the release of a new open source enterprise management solution for JBoss Application Server called Jopr. This project is the open source form of our JBoss Operations Network product built on the RHQ platform that I've written about several times. Jopr will act as the upstream, open source project to the Operations Network and provide a place for the community to collaborate on the use and development of this technology for implementing middleware management. …

JBoss Operations Network 2.1 has been released along with open sourcing further parts of it in Jopr. Read more...

Running a successful project and putting out a successful software product that sells is much like organizing a dinner party...

Read more here

...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, …

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...
Read more here

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...

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...

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...

We are now having a mailing list for commits to the RHQ code base Read more...

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.

Read more...

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. …