Thoughts on…

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.

The bits can be found here.

Quick install steps:

• download & unzip the jopr-server-2.2.1.zip binary
• start the server using scripts at the top-level bin dir
• go to http://localhost:7080/
• click the “Embedded Mode” button at the top at the page (this enables the embedded db *and* the embedded agent)
• click the install button at the bottom of the page

Comments and questions welcome on the Jopr forums.

Note: the embedded database and embedded agent options are not intended production use. They were developed to facilitate quick installs so that new users could easily demo the product, or existing users get a quick overview of what features the latest distribution has to offer. At the time of this writing, there is no upgrade support when choosing the embedded mode option.

I can’t help but relish from time to time how powerful the Jopr / RHQ platform is. When you look at a product like Tomcat you might think that to write an end-to-end management framework around it would take a few man years at best.

Not so with Jopr / RHQ. Instead of spending time worrying about the ins and outs of how to move metric data around your network (and subsequently graph it), how to send a remote method execution down to your server, how to be notified when certain events take place on your servers, how to audit what users do and/or control who does what – you get all of that out-of-box with Jopr / RHQ.

So what does this all mean? It means that by leveraging a robust management platform like Jopr / RHQ you get to focus on what’s important – the servers you’re managing.

Jay Shaughnessy, a colleague of mine, provided the most recent proof of these claims. He wrote a plugin for end-to-end management of Tomcat. By leveraging Jopr / RHQ, he was able to accomplish an impressive amount in a relatively short period of time. But I’ll let him tell you about it…

http://jayshaughnessy.blogspot.com/2009/04/jopr-22-adds-tomcat-management.html

Jopr 2.2.0 has finally been posted to SourceForge!

I’m happy to say that if you download the bits today, assuming you’ve been a user since it’s initial release, you may very well have trouble recognizing that you’re using the same product as before. Although this release was originally focused on just two items – enhancements to support cluster-oriented views and support for monitoring/managing external Tomcat instances – so much more was accomplished.

As you’ll see below, and as the 2.2 sneak peak clearly revealed, usability inadvertently became a focus of this release – a new menu bar with resource and group search functions, resource and group navigation trees with right-click context menus, and a sticky tabbing infrastructure are just some of the notable enhancements.

I’m especially pleased with the number of performance fixes that made it into this release. These weren’t just constrained to back-end processes or how the agents and servers communicate, but several people have been testing the 2.2.0 BETA and have noted they can feel the difference in the user interface. If there’s any one thing that would frustrate me about using a software product I’d have to say it’s how long I wait between when I click something in the UI and when I receive feedback about that action. So we hope you – the community – appreciate the time we took to improve that part of the overall experience for you.

For those that like details, I’ve again gone through JIRA and scanned the more than 600 issues resolved this release. Below is a summary of all of the noteworthy changes:

UI Enhancements

• complete rewrite of event history and / monitoring UI pages from struts/tiles to jsf/facelets for resources, groups, and autogroups
• addition of availability history page for resources
• addition of xmas tree lights for autogroups and compatible groups
• improve display of availability and membership counts for groups
• brand new menu bar to replace old, flat link menu
• brand new resource and group tree navigation components, with right-click context menu support
• subsystem views – config updates, operation history, new oob metrics, alert definitions and alert history
• several other markers/icons added to the overview>timeline page, and fixed it so it works in IE6
• sticky tabs when navigating between resources and a split pane divider that remembers it’s relative percentage location
• gave our tabbing infrastructure a facelift, moved from image rollovers to pure css, and are now using a wicked cool gradient
• revamped resource and group favorites into the menu bar
• support for recently visited resources and groups in the menu bar
• auto-complete / search for resources and groups in the menu bar
• several fixes for ops and alerts pages to improve usability
• added new resource summary page
• updated nearly all of our icons across the entire site
• numerous IE6 and IE7 fixes

Notable Features

• self-healing agents when they detect they are sick
• clean up of authorization rules across several pages in the app
• change to how authz is done – explicit res group denotes membership, while implicit res group is solely for authorization
• dynagroup querying off of current res availability; also support for parent / grandparent / child context querying
• support for dynagroup filtering and pivoting off of properties will NULL values
• auto-recalculation of dynagroups, added some dynagroup “templates” too
• proper use of XA transactions
• config change detection + alerting off of that
• support for aggregate config w/group res config & group plugin config implementations

Plugin Development / Deployment Improvements

• standalone tomcat and EWS support
• fix hot deploy of plugins
• new plugin generator
• pushed deploy of plugins to DB now, not just filesystem
• lenient deployment of plugins whose dependency graph is not satisfied

Caching / Performance Tuning

• fixed paginatedDataTables so they only load once (page-scoped caching)
• all user preferences cached to the session
• MICA icon generation scheme doesn’t require DB hits at all – all done via in-memory lookup
• solved a dozen or so N+1 (or worse) query issues
• revamped measurement out-of-bounds system
• fine-grained updates for measurement baseline calculations
• precompute of current availability for resources
• replaced resource group SLSB methods with native sql solutions, supporting recursive rules
• alerts cache rewritten to be near-lockless, and reloading cache doesn’t block readers
• upgraded quartz library, resolved qrtz_table locking issues
• using sigar proxy cache
• async committal of measurement data on postgres
• events throttling

So download it, try it out, and ping back here or on the Jopr forums if you have any questions.