Shreedhar' s Weblog

Performance Monitor enters Sun's GlassFish offerings

Sun today announced an array of commercial offerings based around the successful open source GlassFish project's application server. As part of these offerings is an enterprise management enabler tool aptly called Enterprise Manager

The Enterprise Manager is a collection of utilities designed to enhance your production deployment experience with Sun GlassFish Enterprise Server v2.1

The Enterprise Manager comprises of three components :

• Performance Advisor
• SNMP Monitoring support
• Performance Monitor

The Enterprise Manager is included when you purchase a support subscription for Sun GlassFish Enterprise Server v2.1. For more details on the Enterprise Manager look here.  For more details on the Sun GlassFish Portfolio subscription plans, look here.

Of the above Enterprise Manager components, the Performance Advisor, and SNMP Monitoring support components are covered in a few other blogs. In this entry, I'll introduce you to the Performance Monitor.

The Performance Monitor is a closed source product from Sun built on top of VisualVM 1.1, and Netbeans 6.5 Platform. It is a  monitoring tool that provides dynamic visualization of GlassFish Server as it runs your applications.

Some of its key features include :

• Monitoring local and remote Java processes
• Trendline representation through charts for JVM monitoring artifacts such as Heap, CPU utilization, threads, classes, etc much like JConsole.
• Data collection, processing and charting for GlassFish monitoring artifacts. There are extensive charts that leverage the GlassFish JMX based APIs and provide views into monitoring the health of your GlassFish deployment. 

The Performance Monitor is designed with easy-to-use features including:

• Easy connectivity
• Local or remote GlassFish servers    
• Choice of SSL/TLS based secure, or plain JMX connections
• Logical fine-grained views of GlassFish servers, clusters, node agents, deployed artifacts and services
• Embellishments such as
  
• tool tips explaining what the chart is about and current numbers,
  
• ability to hide certain chart lines from a chart,
• hide/unhide charts from the page view
• drag top level tab to the side or bottom of page for a lateral or stacked view of the charts.
  
• Detailed charts covering telemetry data for common, critical services and resources in production systems based on feedback from existing customers on the need for charting these monitoring artifacts
  
• these include Http Services including per listener views, Web services, Pools such as thread pools, JDBC and other connection pool statistics, etc.

Here are some screenshots for your reference :

A collective view of a few web tier monitoring data:   

A view of the Http Service graphs :

A View of the Node Agent Page with status of instances the Node Agent is managing:

The Performance Monitor tool is immensely helpful in diagnosing problems before they turn into production bottlenecks and show stoppers. We hope that this offering along with GlassFish support subscription will help our customers be successful with their GlassFish deployments.

Posted at 03:21PM Feb 10, 2009 by Shreedhar Ganapathy in GlassFish  |  Comments[0]