[Hawkular-dev] some new agent features

[John Mazzitelli]

Just wanted to blast out a message about some new wildfly agent features.

1) Agent now supports secure communications between itself and any of its managed WildFly servers. I documented how to enable security in the management interface of WildFly here:

https://github.com/hawkular/hawkular.github.io/blob/pages/src/main/jbake/content/docs/user/secure-comm.adoc#securing-communications-between-agent-and-a-managed-wildfly-server

2) Agent now supports monitoring JMX resources via Jolokia interface.

The agent now can collect JMX metrics and availability data and can inventory JMX resources in the same manner as it can with DMR resources using the Jolokia interface (Jolokia is a very nice REST interface to JMX). Just as we have <metric-dmr>, <avail-dmr>, <resource-type-dmr>, <remote-dmr>, and related DMR settings in the agent subsystem, we now have <metric-jmx>, <avail-jmx>, <resource-type-jmx>, <remote-jmx> settings as well. So the agent can be given metadata that tells it what to do. As with remote WF servers, the agent also supports secure comm to the remote jolokia JMX server.

There are a few things currently on the TODO for the agent:

1) utilize the new inventory "name" attribute - they now have "name" as a first-class setting - I need to see what the agent has to do to use it
2) utilize the inventory's "operation" metadata - I believe operations are now first class concepts in inventory - I need to figure out how to populate it
3) provide a mechanism for the agent to detect runtime changes to inventory. Right now, after the agent does its initial inventory scan, that's it. The inventory is fixed, all resource configuration is fixed, and all we do is collect metrics. The caveat is that if someone deploys a new app or adds a new JDBC driver, we force a new scan. We need a way to detect new resources in inventory (and old resources removed from inventory) and we need a way to detect changes to resource config. This should work for both DMR and JMX inventory items.
4) Need a way to consume wildfly notifications that other subsystems emit and figure out how to send that to a hawkualr events subsystem.
5) Peter is implementing/has implemented the JDBC driver CRUD and datasource CRUD, gonna see how easy it is to implement reload.

I'm sure I'm forgetting something, but .. that's what I remember.