RHQ’s Powerful New Search Facility

Search was developed to enable users to gain deeper insight, more quickly, into their enterprise by supporting a sophisticated method of querying system state. Some of the notable features that this powerful facility brings are:

• Arbitrarily Complex Search Expressions
• Search Suggestions / Auto-Completion / Search Assist
• Results Matching / Highlighting
• User Saved Searches

Take a look at the end-user docs (with screen shots) here. Or, if you want to interact with the Search facilities up close & personal, you can download the latest RHQ binaries here.

Considering the SearchBar was written with the primary purpose of being extensible, it will surely become a much more pervasive concept across RHQ in the future. So, let me know what you liked and/or what you would improve, especially if you can think of other features you’d like to see added. You can either post back here or subscribe to the RHQ developer mailing list.

Jopr has embedded database support!

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.

Don’t reinvent the wheel

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