[Hawkular-dev] using hawkular wildfly agent as a custom java agent

[John Mazzitelli]

Yeah! You should publicize that. People are asking for different agents like this.

----- Original Message -----
> Hi,
> 
> You mean something like this? https://github.com/burmanm/gather_agent (Python
> Agent writing to RHQ Metrics with pluggable inputs). I actually used this
> code in one IoT platform to read statistics from one device and write them
> to one server.
> 
> There's lots of similar projects though which are more full featured (like
> Diamond). These are very easy to extend, for example Golang is terrible in
> that sense.
> 
>   - Micke
> 
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "John Mazzitelli" <mazz at redhat.com>
> To: "Matt Wringe" <mwringe at redhat.com>, "Discussions around Hawkular
> development" <hawkular-dev at lists.jboss.org>
> Sent: Wednesday, March 23, 2016 4:03:55 PM
> Subject: Re: [Hawkular-dev] using hawkular wildfly agent as a custom java
> agent
> 
> > "Do we have plans to have other Agents than just the WildFly one"
> > 
> > For me, being able to gather metrics from a WildFly server is really
> > awesome,
> > but when I am dealing with multiple systems I am going to want to be able
> > to
> > manage all those metrics in the same place.
> 
> I'm thinking about writing a Python agent API - something like an Python
> skeleton or something where someone can take a the Hawkular Python API and
> build around it to collect all metrics without having to do so in a Java VM.
> 
> > Currently its possible for a user to custom write their own component to
> > interface with the Hawkular Metrics server, but in this case it seems like
> > we are asking all our users to continuously write their own agents. Which
> > is
> > not very user friendly and causes a bunch of duplication of effort.
> > It would be awesome to be able to provide more agents that would be simple
> > to
> > setup and configure for different systems.
> 
> Which is why I think having a Python agent API would be useful. No need to
> run a heavyweight Java app like you would with the Hawkular WildFly Agent.
> 
> I know someone (Thomas S?) is writing a vert.x agent.
> 
> I don't know what other efforts are ongoing to write other agents.
> 
> > If I am mostly running a bunch of different Java application, including
> > WildFly, its going to be really tough to convince me to use Hawkular if its
> > only going to monitor a subset of my systems. I would be much better off
> > using Jolokia or something similar which can monitor all or most of my
> > applications.
> 
> If all or most of your applications are exposing data via Jolokia, no reason
> why you can't use the same Hawkular WildFly Agent.
> 
> You can configure one individual Hawkular WildFly Agent to collect data from
> multiple WildFlys AND multiple Jolokia endpoints (which may or may not be
> WildFly servers - the agent don't care - as long as its talking to a Jolokia
> endpoint that's good enough for the agent. It would be a Tomcat server or
> whatever - if its got Jolokia, the Hawkular WildFly Agent will monitor it.)
> 
> Of course, it would be a standalone Java app running along side of all of
> these ... i.e. would NOT be running inside of your Tomcat apps... which is
> your next point...
> 
> > Having the agent running in an EAP instance be able to monitor other
> > jolokia
> > end points is cool. But I don't really understand why this isn't a more
> > standalone java application. I would think it would be much more useful to
> > be able to have a standalone java agent which could run on the same system
> > which is exposing the jolokia endpoint. Say I am only running Tomcat
> > servers
> > and I don't want to run Wildfly just to be able to gather the metrics from
> > Tomcat.
> 
> Yeah, in this case, sounds like you want an embeddable Java agent. Funny -
> because we had this in RHQ/JON, but no one cared for it, no one wanted it,
> no one asked for it :) So we dropped that a long time ago. When we built the
> Hawkular Agent, we took that past experience and said, "why should we write
> a standalone agent when no one wants it? Just write a WildFly subsystem and
> run it directly in WildFly and we get a Java container with a CLI for free."
> :-)
> 
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