[Hawkular-dev] scope of the agent design

[Lukas Krejci]

On Monday, March 16, 2015 15:07:10 John Sanda wrote:
> For monitoring purposes, do we really need to write an agent? Should we just
> leverage existing tools/libraries? I previously cited three common
> architectures for monitoring agents,
> 
> 1) embedded, in-process
> 2) separate process but co-located on same host
> 3) remote monitoring from different host
> 

I think re-using existing stuff is desirable but 1 question needs to be 
addressed first:

How are we going to configure these tools? We could just say that that is out 
of the scope for Hawkular, but I don't find that too user friendly. Things 
like collection intervals or disabling/enabling should be configurable from 
inside Hawkular if the external tool has such capability.

> Let’s consider monitoring the JVM and applications running on it. Coda Hale
> Metrics is a widely used metrics library that is becoming ubiquitous. It
> provides reporters for exporting metrics that are collected. The core
> metrics library provides several reporters, console, JMX, CSV, to name a
> few. There are plenty of 3rd party reported as well, like the Graphite
> reporter. We could implement a hawkular reporter which then makes it very
> easy then for any application, library, etc. that uses Coda Hale Metrics to
> collect and report to hawkular.
> 
> The in-process collector might not always be possible or desirable. For
> those situations the co-located agent is a better fit. jmxtrans could be an
> excellent option. It can query and collect metrics from external JVMs and
> then write them to other systems like Graphite, Ganglia, Open TSDB, and
> more. We could implement a hawkular metrics writer.
> 
> Maybe we take a similar approach for platform metrics with collectd for
> example. We are already doing something similar by seeing how we can
> integrate more directly with cadvisor. Is it worth considering doing the
> same with some of the tools/libraries that are already in wide spread use?
> > On Mar 16, 2015, at 4:13 AM, Gary Brown <gbrown at redhat.com> wrote:
> > 
> > This embedded 'agent' would also be useful for collecting the activity
> > information for RTGov. I assume information will be routed depending on
> > type at the backend?
> > 
> > Regards
> > Gary
> > 
> > ----- Original Message -----
> > 
> >> So what I heard today was we don't want a standalone agent, but we do
> >> want
> >> something that can be embedded in Wildfly/EAP so it can monitor things
> >> running in Wildfly (not just monitor Wildfly itself, but applications
> >> running inside wildfly).
> >> 
> >> That lends itself to supporting customizable modules that can be deployed
> >> in Wildfly/EAP as hawkular subsystems.
> >> 
> >> Can someone give me a quick summary of what Wildfly-Monitor does?
> >> https://github.com/hawkular/wildfly-monitor
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> > 
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