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!

Prashanth has written a detailed description of the new monitoring framework in GlassFish v3, which includes descriptions of the basic concepts of probes, probe provider and probe listeners. Probe providers include both class-based and XML-based providers, where the framework will automagically create a provider without requiring modifications to the existing code. Probe listeners are called from the providers to produce the desired information; for example statistics are generated by StatsProviders.

Prashanth's note also describes how to expose the probes to DTrace and to a OS-agnostic scripting client, and how this is used by different clients, including: JMX/AMX, REST, the Admin console and asadmin. Overall, a great overview - check it out.

PS. I was on vacation last week, just catching up now and I missed announcing the JavaEE 6 and GF v3 webinar from this morning; from what John told me and what I read in the Twitter posts, it was very successful: more than 4K subscribed, and over 1200 attended.

Rajeshwar has written a short description on how to use the GlassFish v3 REST Interface to Configure GlassFish; this complements his previous entry REST and Monitoring and, like that one, it also has examples using a Jersey-based client - included in the post. Related entries are tagged REST+GlassFish+v3. PS. Picture at left shows the anterior eyes of a Jumping Spider.

GlassFish v3 has a REST/HTTP interface that is implemented using Jersey. The interface is used by the GUI admin console but can also be used by other clients; for example, the data can be exported as JSON, XML or HTML and the REST + JSON combination makes JavaScript clients very easy to write. Check out Rajeshwar's recent writeup to learn how to Use the REST interface Monitoring.

Rajesh and team are hard at work plugging in more JMX monitoring features in WebSpace Server and Liferay (see the detailed proposal). This will give administrators a nice overview of performance metrics, fault diagnostics, and in general keeping WebSpace running smoothly. Speaking of performance, Srikanth has also written up an integration of WebSpace Server with Apache Solr, which is recommended for use with GlassFish clusters. The WebSpace Wiki is a great source of material like this for developers and administrators.

RailsInside reports on New Relic "lite", a new free version of New Relic RPM that provides Rails monitoring. The product provides information on throughput, response time as load increases and per-controller action time information. New Relic also has a fully-featured version (watch the Product Tour); and both versions are Supported for GlassFish Server! Arun says he is going to a deeper review of this and another product very soon; stay tuned.

Jagadish shows how to use P6Spy to trace DataBase operations in the GlassFish Server with the intention of detecting performance bottlenecks. The note starts with downloading and configuring P6Spy, and shows how to use it in a simple CMP project. Full details in Jagadish's writeup. And thanks to Gopal for the tip.

I wrote about VisualVM yesterday (entry) but I had missed Octavian's Introduction where he gives instructions on how to use VisualVM on MacOS X. As a reminder, to run the VisualVM client you need a recent JVM, so you will need to use the latest JVM from Apple, but the app can run in a variety of JVMs, remote or local to VisualVM. VisualVM can even save the data into a snapshot and process it offline.

Check Octavian's Note for details.

Meena has posted a quick note on how to turn on GC logging on both the Cluster and the DAS instances of the GlassFish Server; check out her note on Monitoring Memory Growth in GlassFish. I need to catch up on the whole VisualVM effort; perhaps we should invite them for the new TheAquarium TV series.

WiseMan, the WS-Management Java implementation has now become a part of Metro (the GlassFish Web Services stack) community. WiseMan provides both client and server side APIs for building Manageable applications. Jean-François Denise is reporting on the road traveled to provide the WS-Man implementation and make fit best into the existing Metro technology. The Web Services Connector for JMX builds on top of WiseMan to provide connection with WS-Man client tools such as Windows Remote Management much like OpenDMK is a window to the SNMP world.

"What's the relationship to GlassFish?" you may ask. Well, by deploying the Web Services Connector for JMX in GlassFish, all the existing MBeans (such as those defined by AMX, by JSR 77, and by you) are automatically exposed as WS-Management resources. Clearly, the key feature of WiseMan is interoperability.

For the Web Services savvy, Jean-François' entry is buzzword compliant and a very good read (WS-Addressing, Push mode, security, etc...). WiseMan's homepage is at wiseman.dev.java.net. Version 1.0 requires Java SE 5+ or above and JAX-WS 2.1.1.

If JConsole was one of your reasons for moving to Java 5, you'll probably like VisualVM. This recent project is building on top of the NetBeans profiler technology (née JFluid) to provide a NetBeans Platform-powered standalone tool to monitor Java VMs. This tool strikes an interesting balance between monitoring, profiling, and troubleshooting tools. Some plugins such as the MBeans browser are already available from its update center.

VisualVM Milestone 1 is now available and it has support for some applications including GlassFish which means that profiling Java EE applications can happen quite fast by ignoring application server implementation code, with instrumenting only the user code. VisualVM does require Java 6 (Mac users, SoyLatte doesn't seem to save you this time).

JXInsight is a solution for management and monitoring. A Note from William Louth on how to use GlassFish, AspectJ and the forthcoming JXInsight 5.5 Beta 2 together.

Also see William's earlier post on Monitoring GlassFish and check for GlassFish-tagged entries at William's blog.

Masoud is back :-) with an overview of the Monitoring features in GlassFish v2, including • Getting started with the admin console • CallFlow • Run-Time Monitoring • Application Monitoring • Resource Monitoring • Transaction Monitoring

For more details and screenshots on most of these topics, check Masoud's entry. As an extra item, Masoud was using Feisty Fawn.

The old Unix command vmstat(1M) is a workhorse for finding out what your system is doing. Now Jane shows how GlassFish has a similar mechanism; check this image for instance - or go to her blog for more examples.

Administration and monitoring is a typical place where administrators write all sorts of useful scripts. Sun's Web Server has a TCL interpreter embedded; GlassFish has a nice CLI but it is proprietary. Abhijit was brainstorming that perhaps we could use JSR-223 to plug different interpreters. Another separate idea would be to help people share useful scripts. What do you think?

Hudson, the build monitoring tool, seems to be gaining adoption very nicely. John just published a JW article evaluating 4 open source continuous integration tools and Hudson was one of them (also see his blog). Kohsuke is continuously adding features and recently has been focusing on Plugin Support, an approach that has worked very well in JAXB.

There are a number of production deployments of Hudson. GlassFish and NetBeans use it for different tasks (see here and here) and the traffic at the USER mailing list for the project is growing very rapidly. Users seem happy, as this one Switching from Anthill; his production details are worth a read, he has 400 jobs.

BTW, browsing through the list I found a 2004 article on eXtreme Feedback, a variation of Mark Weiser's Ubiquitious Computing initial work at Xerox PARC. Perhaps the time has come for things like this. It certainly would make sense to have this integrated with text messaging like SMS.