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

[John Doyle]

On Wed, Mar 23, 2016 at 9:47 AM, Matt Wringe <mwringe at redhat.com> wrote:

> ----- Original Message -----
> > From: "John Mazzitelli" <mazz at redhat.com>
> > To: "Discussions around Hawkular development" <
> hawkular-dev at lists.jboss.org>
> > Sent: Wednesday, March 23, 2016 9:28:03 AM
> > Subject: [Hawkular-dev] using hawkular wildfly agent as a custom java
> agent
> >
> > This is for Matt, but figured post here for public consumption.
> >
> > The question was asked yesterday, "Can we use the Hawkular WildFly Agent
> to
> > monitor other things other than WildFly?"
>
> My question should have been more:
>
> "Do we have plans to have other Agents than just the WildFly one"
>

We have not discussed it because all of our efforts are around Wildly for
now, but we will need an agent for Fuse at some point.  IDK if a jolokia is
the right answer for that platform or not.

>
> 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.
>
> 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.
>
> 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.
>
> >
> > I gave one answer, but forgot there is a second alternative.
> >
> > ====
> >
> > The first answer that I gave is that you can use the Hawkular Wildfly
> Agent
> > to collect JMX data via Jolokia interface. There is an integration in the
> > agent that lets you define your resource and metric metadata and your
> > JMX/Jolokia servers. As an example, see here:
> >
> https://github.com/hawkular/hawkular-agent/blob/b52529823ca3c54d0b8b4aa560d568cd114afdec/hawkular-wildfly-agent-feature-pack/src/main/resources/subsystem-templates/hawkular-wildfly-agent.xml#L736-L817
> >
> > You define where your JMX servers are via the <remote-jmx> managed server
> > like this:
> >
> >    <remote-jmx name="Remote JMX" enabled="false"
> >    resourceTypeSets="MainJMX,MemoryPoolJMX"
> >    url="http://localhost:8080/jolokia-war"/>
> >
> > OK, that's the JMX integration. Maybe useful, maybe not. But I mention it
> > just in case.
>
> 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.
>
> > ====
> >
> > The second alternative I forgot to mention was the ability for any
> component
> > running in WildFly to obtain a Hawkular Agent proxy via JNDI and use that
> > proxy that store inventory and metrics into the Hawkular Server.
> >
> > There is an example WAR module in the agent git repo that demonstrates
> how to
> > obtain the proxy via JNDI and how to store inventory and metrics - see
> here:
> >
> https://github.com/hawkular/hawkular-agent/tree/master/hawkular-wildfly-agent-itest-parent/hawkular-wildfly-agent-example-jndi
> >
> > This is just a simple WAR with a servlet. But it shows how a component
> can
> > get the agent proxy via JNDI here:
> >
> >
> https://github.com/hawkular/hawkular-agent/blob/master/hawkular-wildfly-agent-itest-parent/hawkular-wildfly-agent-example-jndi/src/main/java/org/hawkular/agent/example/HawkularWildFlyAgentProvider.java#L32-L35
> >
> > Here's code that shows the servlet doing things like sending metrics,
> avail,
> > and creating resources:
> >
> >
> https://github.com/hawkular/hawkular-agent/blob/master/hawkular-wildfly-agent-itest-parent/hawkular-wildfly-agent-example-jndi/src/main/java/org/hawkular/agent/example/MyAppServlet.java
> >
> > No one is using this yet. So there may be issues I am not aware of, but
> we
> > have integration tests that show this working.
> >
> > This was put together with the anticipation of someone asking for this
> > capability - that is, "can the agent be used to collect metrics for other
> > things other than WildFly". Essentially, this just gives you a skeleton
> Java
> > agent that you can extend to collect your own metrics and inventory. So
> you
> > can write a WAR or EAR, deploy it in any WildFly that has an agent
> > subsystem, and your EAR/WAR can be used as an "agent" for your custom
> stuff.
> >
> > Again, maybe useful, maybe not. But I mention it just in case.
>
> Being able to expose custom metrics is extremely important. Awesome that
> we have the ability to do that with the agent currently :)
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