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

Wed Mar 30 10:23:23 EDT 2016

----- Original Message -----
> From: "Jay Shaughnessy" <jshaughn at redhat.com>
> To: hawkular-dev at lists.jboss.org
> Sent: Monday, March 28, 2016 10:59:05 AM
> Subject: Re: [Hawkular-dev] using hawkular wildfly agent as a custom java agent
> 
> 
> I think we should limit ourselves to the Wildfly/EAP agent that we're already
> working on, as EAP hosted app monitoring/mgmt is our bread and butter. Past

Except this assumption is not necessarily correct. Hawkular, at least Hawkular-Metrics, is not only being used just for Wildfly/EAP monitoring.

We are using Hawkular-Metrics in OpenShift (https://github.com/openshift/origin-metrics) and there are other potential integration points that are being looking into. If we only want to handle the Wildfly/EAP case, then we really need to take a good look and determine if these other integrations make sense or not. Otherwise we should really start to look beyond just Wildfly/EAP so that these integration can be handled better.

> that we should provide infrastructure to help others hook into the MW MIQ
> support. So basically, what we're doing so far seems good to me. As
> attractive as it is to have one agent allow many feeds to "plugin" we need
> to be wary of trying to have a single agent/feed do too much, or we'll end
> up with the RHQ scenario of an agent that is too heavy. And from a dev
> standpoint, like miq, we should in general leave the feeds to be impl'd by
> those that want (or are required) to supply data/inventory, in the way that
> they see fit. That community effort will validate and improve our
> infrastructure, and help us maintain focus on the core.
> 
> 
> On 3/24/2016 5:27 AM, Thomas Segismont wrote:
> 
> 
> 
> Hi Matt,
> 
> Answers inline
> 
> 2016-03-23 14:47 GMT+01:00 Matt Wringe < mwringe at redhat.com > :
> 
> 
> ----- 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"
> 
> 
> Here is the list of reporters I know we're working on:
> - hawkular-agent
> - vertx-hawkular-metrics
> - heapster plugin
> - ptrans
> - all language clients (hawkular-go, hawkular-ruby, ... etc)
> 
> There is a JIRA in Metrics for a Node plugin.
> 
> 
> 
> 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.
> 
> This is not true. Many development platforms have plugins to report data over
> the Graphite text protocol. The goal of the ptrans project is to allow reuse
> of existing monitoring infrastructure by forwarding data sent over widely
> used monitoring network protocols to the Metrics HTTP interface.
> 
> 
> 
> It would be awesome to be able to provide more agents that would be simple to
> setup and configure for different systems.
> 
> We already have a few projects (see above) but obviously there's a limit in
> the number of reporters the core team can maintain. ptrans lets us benefit
> from a wide ecosystem of independent metric collectors.
> 
> 
> 
> 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.
> 
> Correct me if I'm wrong, but Jolokia is not a collection system. It is an
> HTTP adaptor around JMX. I would argue that a great majority of Java
> applications either:
> - collect monitoring data with home-built systems and publish to JMX
> - collect monitoring data with Dropwizard Metrics
> 
> In the former case, user can combine jmxtrans(or embedded jmxtrans) with
> ptrans. In the latter, Dropwizard can be configured to send data over the
> Graphite protocol to ptrans.
> 
> 
> 
> > 
> > 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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> 
> 
> --
> Thomas Segismont
> JBoss ON Engineering Team
> 
> 
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