One of the areas that has been improved significantly in GlassFish v3 is monitoring - see Prashanth's Functionality Overview. Most of the functionality is in the core product but some added value features will be part of the next version of the GlassFish Enterprise Manager available through Sun's commercial Sun GlassFish Portfolio. Two recent posts by Sreeni explain how to use the new functionality to Enable/disable monitoring and attach Btrace-agent and to Create pluggable container-monitoring elements. The new monitoring functionality can also be used with JRuby, as Arun describes in How to monitor a Rails app using asadmin, JavaScript, jConsole, REST.

We are all looking forward towards GlassFish v3 FCS!

SNMP (Simple Network Management Protocol) is a set of standards for network management, including an application layer protocol, a database schema, and a set of data objects. Since SNMP is very popular in some enterprise deployments the GlassFish Enterprise Manager includes an SNMP Monitoring AddOn for customers of the GlassFish Portfolio.

Formal Documentation includes Release Notes, Installation and QuickStart Guide, and Reference. The software is available through Sunsolve; if you are interested in using it, send a Request for Evaluation. Our future plan is to move to simpler distribution and evaluation mechanism, borrowing the lessons from the WebStack Enterprise Manager.

The SNMP team has a number of posts on the SNMP monitor: • Rashewar's Overview of the AddOn. • Marc Kossa has a nice Set of Examples. • Sankar on how to Configure SNMP Monitoring. • Olivier writes about the MIB: J2EE MIB and Browsing the MIB • Two more from Oliver: Master Agent Integration and Security in SNMP. • And yet another from Oliver: How to Monitor Different Domains.

Nazrul has an Overview of The GF Enterprise Monitor Offerings that is intended to be up-to-date (I believe Oliver's last post is not yet there).

Sun's supported (L)AMP distribution, the GlassFish WebStack, was released last week and the team has several new posts on the new Enterprise Monitor for Apache: • Irfan covers Dashboard and Analytics and Navigation Views and Recent Alerts. • Jeff has an in-depth post on Monitoring Apache Server with Web Stack • Brian shows how to apply the tool in The Enterprise Manager and memcached • Amit shows the tool in action through a (silent) screencast.

Sun's LAMP support is assembled from two pieces: the L is from our Linux/GNU Support (see SunSolve entry), while the AMP comes from the GlassFish WebStack, which, in its latest incarnation includes Apache HTTP Server, lighttpd, memcached, MySQL, PHP, Python, Ruby, Squid, Tomcat, GlassFish (v2.1) and Hudson (features).

The inclusion of Hudson is a bit of an opportunistic move (more on that in a bit), the rest comprises a well tested, integrated, optimized, and extended component stack for your new and old Web Apps.

The WebStack can be downloaded here; the bundle includes the WebStack Enterprise Manager, which, unlike the other components, is not free right-to-use but rather is available with an eval license; this is a model like that of the GlassFish Enterprise Manager. The current release supports RHEL, Solaris and OpenSolaris (it is bundled in OpenSolaris); for additional details, check out the Documentation and Discussion Forum.

Check out these posts from the WebStack team:

Pat reports on the first build of FAM 8.0 as part of the OpenSSO community. This will provide convergence with Access Manager and Federation Manager features, in an Open Source model, like GlassFish. Check out the architecture (blog, wiki) and the roadmap (blog, diagram). New features include much improved usability, Access and Federation Manager Features, Identity Services and Web Services Security - more details here.

Download it here, play with it and give feedback at the USERS list. I think FAM/OpenSSO will have a big impact on the industry; check it out.