w00t! We have now officially launched Applications Manager 8.3. This month has been exciting for all of us. First we saw the release of much awaited and anticipated Apple 3G iPhone, then we saw the release of world’s famous browser Mozilla Firefox 3.0 and now its our turn to release SMB’s favorite applications performance software Applications Manager 8.3. You can download the evaluation copy here or if you have already installed Applications Manager, you can upgrade by downloading this service pack here. Applications Manager 8.3 now comes with a lot more support for
We are now officially “Vista Capable” as well. We have also included support for Oracle 10.1.3 and enabled restricted access to monitor groups for managers. All this and much more in Appmanager 8.3!
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There has been several key upgrades that has been introduced in the current version. This post will be about focusing on some of those key features mentioned in current release. As the old saying goes “a good picture is worth a thousand words” we decided to release some screenshots of those features and let the screenshots speak for itself. If you have not yet upgraded to the new build, you can download it here and if you would like to more about these features click here.
Some of the major upgrades that we will be discussing in the next couple of posts:
- Availability and Health Reports - Critical and History Snapshots that have been added
- Outage Comparison Reports
- Availability Trend Reports
- Ability to configure and integrate business hours
- Network Interface Monitoring in WMI mode added
- Sybase Support added
There is going to be a couple more posts with some good screenshots with regards to these updates for your viewing. Some of major upgrades that were done in 8.2 were availability and health reports including critical snapshot, and history reports. Applications Manager generates reports that help you to analyze the performance of your Monitor Group. The reporting function enables you to analyze your servers/applications/services even across months and all this even without having to make any additional configuration changes. These reports depicts the availability, health, response time and alerts of the application over a specified period of time. In addition, critical and current snapshot are also provided to project a better understanding of the health and availability of applications.
Availability and Health reports of a banking application integrated with business hour
Outage comparison report integrated with business hour
Current snapshot report for the customer portal business service
Critical snapshot report for the customer portal business service
The current snapshot report provides you in-depth details such as monitor type, availability of that particular monitor including its health and most importantly a message column which indicates any information regarding the health and availability of the monitor in question. In Critical snapshot report, in addition to the above mentioned details “Monitor Group” details is also included.
Availability Trend report for Store application
More screenshots to follow… 
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[ <b>Mood:</b> Cool ]<br />[ <b>Currently:</b> Working ]<br />We have been getting requests on how to monitor Glassfish (Open Source Application Server) using ManageEngine Applications Manager . So I will cover the various aspects supported by Applications Manager so that you get more visibility.
Applications Manager in addition to supporting Server Monitoring and Database Monitoring has the capability to build dashboards for JMX MBeans. We will use this along with Java Runtime Monitoring and URL Sequence Monitoring to monitor Glassfish. Before going forward, I would like to thank Gregrluck for his post on Glassfish monitoring in our forums.
JMX Dashboard :
Basically any JMX enabled Application on JMX 1.2 / JDK 1.5 can be monitored with this approach. Glassfish has some useful management information already exposed and you could monitor the same with this option.
1) Download and Install Applications Manager
2) I downloaded Glassfish here and this doc was very useful to get started !
I used the default configuration for Glassfish : Details below
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| [exec] Using port 4848 for Admin.[exec] Using port 8080 for HTTP Instance.[exec] Using port 7676 for JMS.
[exec] Using port 3700 for IIOP. [exec] Using port 8181 for HTTP_SSL. [exec] Using default port 3820 for IIOP_SSL. [exec] Using default port 3920 for IIOP_MUTUALAUTH. [exec] Using default port 8686 for JMX_ADMIN. User Name : admin Password : adminadmin |
3) Now, in Glassfish make the following changes in domain.xml
Make “accept-all” property to “true” for the “jmx-connector” node.
<jmx-connector accept-all=”true”
My config line looks like :
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| <jmx-connector accept-all=”true” address=”0.0.0.0″ auth-realm-name=”admin-realm” enabled=”true” name=”system” port=”8686″ protocol=”rmi_jrmp” security-enabled=”false”/> |
4) Now Login to Applications Manager Web Console (http://localhost:9090 admin/admin)
Click “New Monitor” > “JMX Applications” link :
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| Specify the following :Host Name : hostnameSubNet Mask: 255.255.255.0
Port : 8686 (assuming default, check jmx-connector xml node > port property in domain.xml) Polling Interval : 5 JNDI Name : /jmxrmi Authentication Enabled : selected User Name : admin Password : adminadmin (for me same as my Glassfish admin console password)Click “Add Monitor” |
5) Now in the Web Console, navigate to the “JMX Application” details page : “Monitors tab” > “JMX Applications”. Click “Add Custom Attributes” > Select a MBean domain and add those attributes.
I had deployed hello.war”, hence I went to the MBean domain “com.sun.appserv” > added the MBean ” com.sun.appserv:j2eeType=Servlet,name=jsp,WebModule=//server/hello,…” attributes.
More details in help and website.
JVM Monitoring
This has similar capability of JConsole. Additionally there is the capability to configure thresholds, email alerts, mbean operations triggered based on a monitored metric, Reports etc.
Check out the help docs on how to configure.
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| The values I had given in Applications Manager while Adding a “New Monitor” for “Java Runtime” are :Host Name : localhostSubNet Mask : 255.255.255.0
Port : 8686 JNDI Name : /jmxrmi Authentication Enabled : selected Username : admin Password :adminadmin |
That’s it and you have the JVM of Glassfish monitored.
I know this post is getting long, but its not complete without
URL Sequence Monitoring for Web Applications
For web applications you could create a synthetic test (URL Sequence monitor) and ensure that your Web Application is up and also track response times at various steps in the transaction.
I created one for the hello web application and that’s how i ensured I get a non zero “requestCount” for mbean attribute for my hello.war web app
ok, more seriously, take for example a ticketing web application, you could record (using the recorder.exe tool) a flight status query to your web application and configure Applications Manager to check this every 10 minutes and let you know when there a slump in performance. You may also want to check out the multi-location capability.
If you are still reading, then get started and download the product and try the free edition atleast !
Cheers
Gibu
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One of the most important features planned for our next service pack is support for monitoring an SOA using Web Services (SOAP). Now what is SOA or Service oriented architecture ?
SOA is a flexible architecture that helps integrate reusable software components and form a more complex application and help meet complex business needs. The use of Web Services to achieve this is seen as the next most important challenge for CIOs.
These Web Services help join the various end points (services) and the combination of these services help form an SOA. With Applications Manager you could monitor these critical Web Services and ensure high uptime soon !
The popular methodology to implement Web Services is using SOAP over HTTP. With more and more business critical applications being integrated, monitoring of performance and availability of these Web Services are very critical.
With ManageEngine Applications Manager, you could configure SLAs and track high level availability of the Web Service. Application Admins can monitor the performance of these Web Services by configuring Applications Manager to execute “Operations” published by the Web Service. By specifying the WSDL, a simple wizard would guide you to configure operations that need to be invoked and specify arguments to the operations. In addition to this the ability to configure thresholds, view reports, SLAs, Root Cause Analysis etc will help application support personnel to pin point trouble points quickly.
Stay tuned ….
Gibu
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