[Hawkular-dev] scope of the agent design

[John Mazzitelli]

I was going to wait to post this, but since it was brought up already, might as well start this thread now.

Regardless of how the agent is to be implemented, we need to answer the question "WHAT will the agent DO?" It is an existential question - kind of like asking "What is the purpose to my life?" :)

So, what do we plan on having the agent do? What is its scope?

How much knowledge of the inventory does the agent need to know? How does it gain this knowledge of its inventory?

Does the agent auto-discover resources? How?

Can the agent be told about resources that it cannot auto-discover?

Does the agent need to be pluggable so it can load and interface with plugins to handle monitoring of different resources? What are these plugins?

Additionally, we can add (in Juca's words):

> What is the scope of the agent? Will it gather only data about the
> environment, like, memory consumption, span of worker threads, CPU
> consumption, GC-time, ...? Or business metrics as well, like "requests
> per second", "number of exceptions in the last X minutes", "average
> time spent on database", and so on?
> 
> Also, is the same agent also responsible for capturing non-JVM related
> data, like, disk space utilization, network traffic, ...?