A picture is worth a thousand words; so I give you a preview of our application monitoring application showing what it found out about an application running in a Tomcat 6.0 instance.
We will give full preview with demos at one of the forthcoming Open Source User Group meets.
How do we do it? Simple: we combine the usual suspects of the JEE world. We grab the sources using Maven, we analyse the stack traces using Drools and we perform static code analysis using FindBugz. Finally, we produce suggestions for unit tests that show the defect using StringTemplate.
The result is that our monitoring tool can tell you what happened, where in the source code, generate code to reproduce it and, in most cases, suggest solutions to fix it. Here, the infamous NPE is not complex enough to fix in any innovative way, but consider a Hibernate lazy loading failure. We can suggest eager loading the object in the repository/HibernateTemplate or initializing the object in a @Transactional context.
Just wait until we wire in Spring Roo–then there is no reason why zookeeper cannot generate Roo scripts to fix the application automatically. But that’s coming in version 2.0, we still have loads to do for version 1.0.
Zookeeper will initially monitor Tomcats, but the architecture allows us to monitor any other application server. We do not at this stage aim to have full-blown monitoring tool.
Talking of OSUG – any idea when the next Manchester one is?
And did the second OSJ journal ever get published?
Natalie and Wendy at SkillsMatter are finishing the pre-printing & graphics design work; the next issue will ship to the printer in the next few weeks. I’ll double-check with Guy about the user group and be in touch.