Comparing FR to JMX

[MoBarger]

Hi - I am reading up on JMX and am curious if anyone has enabled this
in their instances and how it compares to your FR experiences.

[charlie arehart]

I've enabled JMX before and was never too impressed with the results. I
would not consider it at all as comparable to FR. Of course, each does solve
different problems.

For those who don't know, JMX is "Java Management Extensions" and it's just
a standard way that java app servers (like JRun which underlies CF by
default) can expose various statistics about configuration and (to a degree)
performance. It can't be seen as a replacement for FR. But some of what it
can expose may be interesting, but conversely FR offers a great interface,
the Crash Protection features to watch for error conditions and make
notification/take action, the tremendous logs, and more.

Oh, how I love the logs! :-) Whether the resource log tracking hi-level
stats every 5 seconds, or the request logs tracking details of the start/end
of each request, and the jdbc log tracking the sql and performance details
of each query. This logging is something that the CF8/9 Enterprise Server
Monitor doesn't do at all, and SeeFusion has some logging (but only of
things that exceed certain measures, and then logging only to a database).

FR's logs can be so critical to look at when trying to track down a problem.
Even given how much data they track, it's often possible to eyeball critical
info in the logs. And when you do need to do deeper analysis, there is the
free Microsoft Log Parser that can help, as discussed (with respect to
FusionReactor specifically) here:
http://groups.google.com/group/fusionreactor/web/log-parser-commands-for-fr-
3

OK, I went a little off-topic praising the logs. :-) I'm not aware of JXM
being able to do logging, but since it's a core Java server feature, I
suppose it may have some integration with log4j. I don't know. Anyone have
more specific experience with JMX? Was it useful?

Here are some resources on enabling it in CF/JRun:

http://www.jamesnetherton.com/blog/2007/04/04/Configuring-JRun-and-ColdFusio
n-with-JMX/+coldusion+jmx
http://www.adobe.com/devnet/java/articles/jmx.html

/charlie

[MoBarger]

That is pretty much what I gathered, Charlie. As far as I can tell,
JMX exposes metrics regarding the overall container, but as far as
activities inside the container, not so much. My management is
interested because the new version of our enterprise monitoring tool
supports JMX and they were wondering what else could be monitored with
one tool. While this is convenient, it does not offer any control like
FR does, only monitoring. IMO there are other things wrong with this
approach (for example any test results would not be real time being
the biggest) but I have come to rely heavily on FR and its abilities
and will fight hard to keep it. :)

On Nov 11, 12:48 pm, "charlie arehart" <charlie_li...@carehart.org>
wrote:

> I've enabled JMX before and was never too impressed with the results. I
> would not consider it at all as comparable to FR. Of course, each does solve
> different problems.
>
> For those who don't know, JMX is "Java Management Extensions" and it's just
> a standard way that java app servers (like JRun which underlies CF by
> default) can expose various statistics about configuration and (to a degree)
> performance. It can't be seen as a replacement for FR. But some of what it
> can expose may be interesting, but conversely FR offers a great interface,
> the Crash Protection features to watch for error conditions and make
> notification/take action, the tremendous logs, and more.
>
> Oh, how I love the logs! :-) Whether the resource log tracking hi-level
> stats every 5 seconds, or the request logs tracking details of the start/end
> of each request, and the jdbc log tracking the sql and performance details
> of each query. This logging is something that the CF8/9 Enterprise Server
> Monitor doesn't do at all, and SeeFusion has some logging (but only of
> things that exceed certain measures, and then logging only to a database).
>
> FR's logs can be so critical to look at when trying to track down a problem.
> Even given how much data they track, it's often possible to eyeball critical
> info in the logs. And when you do need to do deeper analysis, there is the
> free Microsoft Log Parser that can help, as discussed (with respect to

> FusionReactor specifically) here:http://groups.google.com/group/fusionreactor/web/log-parser-commands-...

> 3
>
> OK, I went a little off-topic praising the logs. :-) I'm not aware of JXM
> being able to do logging, but since it's a core Java server feature, I
> suppose it may have some integration with log4j. I don't know. Anyone have
> more specific experience with JMX? Was it useful?
>
> Here are some resources on enabling it in CF/JRun:
>

> http://www.jamesnetherton.com/blog/2007/04/04/Configuring-JRun-and-Co...
> n-with-JMX/+coldusion+jmxhttp://www.adobe.com/devnet/java/articles/jmx.html