[infinispan-dev] a nice HTML5 console for Infinispan & a question on MBean names...

[James Strachan]

Howdy folks!

I'm working on a HTML5 web console called hawtio (http://hawt.io)
which is a pluggable & modular console for various Java libraries,
frameworks and containers. e.g. today it has plugins for Apache Camel,
ActiveMQ, Fuse Fabric as well as JMX, OSGi & Logging - then plugins
for containers like Tomcat, Jetty, JBoss, Karaf/ServiceMix. We've a
cute dashboard & wiki which uses git to store its configuration/files
too.

Anyway the reason I bring this up is yesterday we had our first
Infinispan issue with hawtio:
https://github.com/hawtio/hawtio/issues/134

its now fixed; but it got me thinking if we could have a nice little
hawtio plugin for Infinispan so folks could make dashboards of real
time metrics of caches, browse caches etc.


I enabled metrics and managed to get a basic JMX tree going with real
time metrics on attributes/charts on a single Cache using vanilla JMX
in hawtio with Infinispan. I've attached an example of how it looks if
you're interested.

The thing is, there's no way to easily click on a folder and get all
the MBeans for the Statistics. If that were the case then hawtio would
show a sortable table of all the metrics of all the caches in one
table view; or we could easily chart any of the metrics of all the
caches in one real time chart easily.

It'd be a fairly minor change; we'd just need to change the ObjectName
used for the Cache mbeans from this naming convention:

Infinispan:type=Cache,name="drink(local)",manager="DefaultCacheManager",component=Statistics

to this (just moving the "name" property to the end)

Infinispan:type=Cache,manager="DefaultCacheManager",component=Statistics,name="drink(local)"

then in the hawtio JMX tree we could select the "Statistics" folder
and see all of the mbeans in a table and so you could sort the table
by metric, see all the values on a single screen & create real time
charts of any permutation of cache & metric.

I wondered if folks fancied either adopting this naming convention
(putting the name last and the component kind before it) or adding a
configuration flag so we could enable this kind of JMX naming
convention style? It'd make things much more hawt when using hawtio
and infinispan! :). You'd get nice HTML5 statistics in hawtio
instantly on all caches.


I also wondered if folks fancied adding a few more operations to the
Cache mbean so that we could build a little console in hawtio for
Infinispan; to view/update contents of the caches or flush them etc?

As a background; since JMX is usually the lowest common denominator,
hawtio defaults to using it to detect whats in a JVM. If we discover a
particular kind of MBean we then enable/disable different parts of the
hawtio UI dynamically. e.g. if you're viewing a JVM then you deploy
some Apache Camel, hey presto, the Camel UI in hawtio appears as a
tab.

>From a technology perspective hawtio is all static HTML5 / JavaScript
on the client; it then communicates with the MBeans via an awesome
library called jolokia (http://jolokia.org/) which exposes JMX over
HTTP/JSON.

So hawtio could totally use the Infinispan REST API (but it'd be nice
if there was an mbean registered to indicate the REST API is running
and where to find it so hawtio could discover it). However you can
usually rely more on JMX being there (folks don't always deploy
Infinispan inside a web container with a REST API). So I wondered if
folks fancied adding a simple little JMX API to query / update / flush
the cache that we could then use to build a little HTML5 console in
hawtio?

e.g something valuely like:

interface CacheMBean {
  ...

  String getJson(String key)

  void setJson(String key, String value);

   // lets browse the keys - in a simple paginated way some how..
  Set<String> getCacheKeys( String from, int count);
}

You could return Objects; jolokia automarshalls things to JSON; though
maybe having a specific JSON reading/writing mbean (using
jolokia/jackson under the covers) might be neater as it'd work with
all JMX tools?


So in summary, I'm happy to help hack a little hawtio plugin for
infinispan if anyone's interested. Making the cache ObjectName change
would be a nice quick win & if more operations get added to the MBeans
we can then easily build a better hawtio plugin for Infinispan.

Thoughts?

--
James
-------
Red Hat

Email: jstracha at redhat.com
Web: http://fusesource.com
Twitter: jstrachan, fusenews
Blog: http://macstrac.blogspot.com/

Open Source Integration
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