Friday, July 20, 2012

Availability Duration Alerting in RHQ/JBossON


Red Hat has recently released version 3.1 of JBoss ON (JON), built on the upstream RHQ Project. RHQ version 4.4 made significant improvements to Availability handling.  Availability is a critical management component, basically monitoring and reporting on whether your resources are running (UP) or not (DOWN).  For an overview of the availability changes in RHQ 4.4, both performance enhancements and new features, see the RHQ wiki.   You can also check out the blog by Mazz that talks in some more detail about some of the changes.

Here I just want to bring to your attention the cool new feature of Availability Duration alerting.  Prior to this release RHQ had the ability to alert only on availability state changes.  Specifically,  "Goes DOWN" and "Goes UP".  This was very rigid because it means you'll generate alerts on brief periods of down time, even if that downtime was anticipated.

In many real-world use cases you'd prefer to be alerted only if an resource goes down and "Stays DOWN" for a certain length of time.  This is what Availability Duration alerting is all about.

The following demo, about 5 minutes long, walks you through the new feature with a simple example:




If you were watching closely you may have noticed a few other things, like the quick availability reporting after lifecycle events.  That is just one of many improvements for making availability reporting more timely and therefore more useful.

We're always interested in feedback, let us know what you think by commenting here, on the rhq-users mailing list, or #rhq on freenode!  Thanks!

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