Monitoring, resource managing & logging application for desktop apps.

Question

Hi,
I am newbie as far as health checking, monitoring applicartions are concerned.
Actually we have several services written in java, & those services/apps. normally runs on differnet machines as a windows service.
I have to write a monitoring & controlling application for all those services.
The monitoring application can atleast
1) Start stop the services(apps) remotely
2) Check the health of all the services running on separate machines.(heart beat)
3) log the details provided by those application so track down if any problem occurs.
Which J2EE technology is usefull for htis, is JMX can used for standalone apps?
-Thanks.
Edited by: kashif10 on Feb 18, 2008 5:56 AM

Answer 1

kashif10 wrote:
HI jtahlborn,
actually lets take an example.
LIke I have a samle java console apploication which is running in lopp & printing some thing.
Now I expose it using JMX by exposing the RMI service url.
Now I can see that the application is running using the jconsole remotely.
Now my task is to stop that application or start the application usng jcolsole or any JMX adapter UI.
I can't find any builtin start(), stop() method.are you attempting to start/stop the entire jvm, or a "service" within the jvm? the former will be tricky (or impossible via java alone), whereas the latter is exactly what jmx is designed for.
note, jboss actually accomplishes jvm restarts via jmx by running the jvm within a script which monitors the return code. a specific return code from the jvm will cause the script to loop and respawn the java process.
As far as logging is concerned.
I mean that the application running remotely send some log messsages to adapter which can be usefull to track where any request stuck. I think notification is the best way to do it.
Or JMS can be useful.jms would probably be overkill for remote logging, but certainly doable. the complication with remote logging is that you probably want to internally buffer some amount of the logs (in case the remote service seems to be hanging), so that you can access some amount of historical information. if you just log through some simple messaging protocol, when you attach to the log, you will only get new messages. like i said, it's not necessarily a trivial thing to implement, so using a 3rd party solution is preferable. for an example of what i'm talking about, check out the jboss jmx appender (adapter for log4j). although i don't think this does any buffering, it can feed another table (the AlarmTable) which can be queried for the current system status.
http://wiki.jboss.org/wiki/Wiki.jsp?page=JMXNotificationAppender