Thursday, April 30, 2009

Jopr 2.2 adds Tomcat Management

Version 2.2.0 of the Jopr management platform has been released today. It is a powerful system that allows you to manage a complex, distributed environment of deployed hardware and software. Jopr has a plugin architecture allowing different plugins to provide management for specific products or systems. Jopr provides strong management support for environments running JBoss Application Servers but out of the box provides a large set of plugins for managing an entire system. For example, platform plugins (Linux, Windows), database plugins (Oracle, Postgres), Hibernate, Apache web server, and many, many more.

A major addition in Jopr 2.2 is the Tomcat plugin, introducing powerful management for standalone Tomcat environments via Jopr. Jopr already provided support for Tomcat embedded in JBoss Application Server and the new Tomcat plugin completes the picture.

The beauty of Tomcat management with Jopr is that Tomcat is often only one piece of your infrastructure. With Jopr you get seamless, holistic management of your whole, distributed, environment, from hardware, to middleware, to applications. And, Jopr is completely extensible, allowing easy custom plugin writing and deployment.

OK, let's take a look at what the new Tomcat plugin provides.

Discovery

  • Automatic discovery of your running Tomcat Servers
  • Manual discovery of Tomcat Servers.
  • Hierarchical inventory of your Tomcat Server's resources
As Jopr utilizes the Tomcat JMX Beans your Tomcat server does need to be enabled for remote JMX access. Secure, authenticated JMX is supported.

Control
  • Server: Start, Shutdown, Restart, Save Configuration
  • Connector: Start, Stop, Pause, Resume
  • Application: Start, Stop, Reload
Any Jopr Operation can be executed immediately or flexibly scheduled for future or repeated executions. Operations can also be executed in response to the firing of a triggered alert.

Web Application Management
  • Web applications offer a full slate of management and monitoring options.
  • Control operations
  • Deploy/Undeploy
  • Version control
  • URL specific response time monitoring
  • Application cache monitoring
  • Powerful metric collection
Configuration
Configuration changes to the Tomcat Server are applied immediately and persisted, surviving Tomcat restarts.

Virtual Host Management
Supports management of multiple hosts and configuration of deploy options for the hosts.

User Management
For environments using Tomcat's default Realm and supplied User Database, manage your users with immediate and persisted updates.
  • Role: Create/Delete/Assignment/Configuration
  • User: Create/Delete/Configuration
  • Group: Create/Delete/Assignment/Configuration
And More...
  • Connector Management
  • Threadpool monitoring
  • Powerful monitoring of the Tomcat Server JVM
And the Tomcat plugin gets all of the Jopr infrastructure for free! Jopr gives you:

Cluster Management
Group together resources of the same type, like your Tomcat Servers, and immediately see a cluster view of your resources, easily pointing out similarities and differences. Perform configuration update or operations
across the cluster.

Availability, Monitoring, Metric gathering and Charting
See your data graphically, with personal views and overlayed metric charts. Granular metric collection scheduling and access to plenty of historical data. Plus, aggregate views for manually created or autogroups.

Alerting and Operations
Define simple or complex alerts with various notification options. Schedule immediate or scheduled operations.

Resource Summary and Timeline
A Quick summary of important activity for any Tomcat resource. Plus, a timeline view for correlating availability, operations, alerts and other activity for your resource.

Security
Complete role-based and permission based security for Jopr users limits access to and authorization of inventoried resources.

If you've used Jopr for your management needs in the past then this adds one more tool for you to use. If you haven't I hope you found this brief introduction useful. Download Jopr 2.2.0 and let us know what you like and what you'd still like to see for Tomcat management in Jopr.