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.


13 comments:

Unknown said...

Going to try it now. I like the sounds of this.

Can it be used to automate the deployment of WAR files?

Jay Shaughnessy said...

Hi, The Tomcat plugin does take advantage of Jopr's natural ability to support content deployment and deletion. So, WAR files can be physically deployed and deleted from the Tomcat Server, via Jopr. It even supports version control and deployment history. For more on Content handling in Jopr see this nice blog and demo:

http://management-platform.blogspot.com/2009/04/applying-patches-updates-and-other.html

As for automating WAR deployment, I'm not sure exactly if we support what you are looking for in Jopr 2.2. Perhaps we do, again, check out the link above. I can say this, we are working actively in trunk to support a remote api that will allow you to deploy content via your own remote app/script.

Unknown said...

Hi, I installed Jopr 2.2 last week and it discovery without problems the Jboss and Tomcat (standalone) in my laptop. But I think I did something went wrong cause the Tomcat doesn't send any information.

Is there any kind of installation requirements or step-by-step manual to correctly "plug" the Tomcat to JOPR ?

Jay Shaughnessy said...

Hi, yes, if you didn't already it is required that the Tomcat Server be instrumented for remote JMX access. In the startup.sh/.bat script for Tomcat you need to add something like (substitute for your desired port):

JAVA_OPTS="${JAVA_OPTS} -Dcom.sun.management.jmxremote.port=PORTNUM"
JAVA_OPTS="${JAVA_OPTS} -Dcom.sun.management.jmxremote.authenticate=false"
JAVA_OPTS="${JAVA_OPTS} -Dcom.sun.management.jmxremote.ssl=false"
export JAVA_OPTS

You'll need to restart after adding this. The above is not authenticated, if you want to have authenticated JMX access then ollow the steps for secure access as described here: http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.5.0/docs/guide/management/agent.html.

If you use authenticated access then you'll need to set the username/passowrd in the Tomcat Server Connection properties after the server is discovered by Jopr.

David Space said...

Hi, The current e-mail notification sent by JOPR is not configurable to tackle the SMTP authentication. May I know is this feature will be enhance in the future releases? Thanks

bwa said...

Hi,

I followed all the instructions, can use JConsole to connect to Tomcat's JMX server, but the plugin still thinks that there's no measurement data. Am I missing something? Any ideas why it might (mis)behave like that?

-- Bruno

Jay Shaughnessy said...

Bruno,

I'm not sure. Take a look at [1] and ensure everything looks correct.

There was an issue with symlinks that has been corrected in trunk.

If you continue to have issues please post in the Jopr forum [2] or possibly jump on IRC at #jopr.

Thanks, Jay

[1] http://jopr.org/confluence/display/JOPR2/Best+Practices+for+Managing+Tomcat+Servers

[2] http://www.jboss.org/index.html?module=bb&op=viewforum&f=292

Manoj said...

For authenticated SMTP , JOPR uses JBOSS mail service. Edit mail-service.xml file supplying your credentials

For me it solved the problem

But One issue Iam facing is embedded tomcat server within JBOSS is not sending any metrics ? Any Folks know the reason

Thanks
Manoj

Jay Shaughnessy said...

Manoj,

The JBoss Embedded Tomcat management is actually performed by the JBoss AS plugin as opposed to the Standalone Tomcat plugin. There are various reasons why you may be having issues. If your server resource is unavailable it's often due to not supplying login credentials in the connection properties. If it's available but you're getting no metrics it may be that you've not enabled the server for remote JMX access. See here for more on that issue [0].

And to Chang, thanks!

[0] http://jopr.org/display/JOPR2/JMX+Server

Unknown said...

I will work on it definetly.Remote Infrastructure Management

Jay Shaughnessy said...

banlin, See http://www.jboss.org/rhq for the latest version and news.

Unknown said...

Jay,

I want to use the Content Patching facility in JON for Tomcatv5 and Tomcatv6. The plug-in for Tomcat doesn't seem to support Content Patching. Is there a new version of the plug-in for Tomcat that supports Content patching in JON?

Li

Jay Shaughnessy said...

Li Chin,

If you are asking whether the Tomcat plugin supports patching the Tomcat installation itself, I think the answer is no. I believe the Tomcat plugin supports only WAR file deployment and update as content-related services.

If you are are a JON subscriber you could open a support case and perhaps make an official feature request for any desired functionality.

Thanks! Also, feel free to ask questions on IRC, #rhq on freenode, or use the RHQ forums.