Erik, this is some very interesting work. Thanks for posting all
these details.
Like Anita's comment in GERONIMO-3441, I'm wondering whether or not
it would make sense to implement these new capabilities more tightly
with the JMX capabilities already in the server. I don't have her
depth of knowledge to follow on all the details, but from a
conceptual point of view I do tend agree with her. All that console
refactoring you mentioned is still a work in progress. But FYI I
included the JMX viewer in a "debug views" plugin [1] that also
contains those other dojo based viewers (classloader, dependency,
JNDI, and LDAP). Given the amount of additional capabilities that
we could add around the JMX view (i.e. the work you have described
here) I think we could actually make it part of a separate management
plugin instead.
On a related note, for some time I have thought it would be cool to
have a Hyperic plugin for Geronimo. It would provide many of the
capabilities you have described. From a technical point of view I
think its possible because its uses j2ee as its runtime framework,
but there may be non-technical issues someone could point out. If
there's interest we could look into collaborating with them on a
plugin as part of the investigation you have described below.
One more thing -- I don't know if its within the scope of this work,
but I think it would be very useful we could also think about
providing some generic way to manage and configure clusters in
Geronimo. Clustering technology is coming at us pretty fast right
now and our users are going to need some way to interact with all
those knobs and dials without cracking open a bunch of XML files.
Last I heard the Terracotta guys were working on a portlet for the
admin console. Maybe they can suggest some functionality that can/
should be implemented in a generic way within a management view.
Best wishes,
Paul
[1] http://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/geronimo/plugins/debugviews
On Aug 23, 2007, at 5:56 PM, Erik B. Craig wrote:
All,
Recently Viet Nguyen and myself have been working on a project that
would ultimately assist a great deal in monitoring and managing
services within a single geronimo instance, as well as in a cluster
environment with upwards of thousands of machines. While it is
currently in its infant stages, we felt it best to get some basic
framework down and take it here as soon as possible to get as much
community involvement in the project as possible, hopefully
resulting in a much more polished product at the end.
Currently what we have is a collection agent (MBean) that will run
on a given instance of geronimo (can be anything minimal and up),
collecting data from Tomcat only at present (No worries, we haven't
forgotten about jetty and our other core component friends). This
is done at a set interval and thrown into an XML file residing in
the /var directory. This mbean also serves as a jmx server
connection, ultimately providing the gateway to any number of
operations and data requests (deploy/undeploys, star/stops,
attribute modifications) from a 'management node' to the machine
running this mbean in a clustered environment.
In conjuction with this, we have also been doing the basic work on
a porlet designed around the new (improved) much more plugable
admin console that Paul has been doing a lot of work on lately.
Currently it is utilizing dojo chart to generate graphs on request
with data that is pulled from the Management MBean, ultimately
coming from the logged snapshots in the xml file.
It would be greatly appreciated if some of you would take the time
to have a look at what we currently have, maybe give some input...
and just maybe if some of you are interested, hopping on board as
well =)
There is a jira up that has the necessary files attached to it
https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/GERONIMO-3441
There is also a more in-depth explanation of long term goals with
this up in the wiki here:
http://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/GMOxDEV/Monitoring+and
+Management+Service
In addition to these, here are a couple direct links to some
screenshots to ohh and ahh over the pretty graphs
https://issues.apache.org/jira/secure/attachment/12364451/
screenshot1.jpg
https://issues.apache.org/jira/secure/attachment/12364451/
screenshot2.jpg
Thanks!
--
Erik B. Craig
