Introducing JtSysMon

I spend a lot of time on the train travelling to work. Working from home has not really taken off in this part of the world - so, what better to do with that time than practice my craft? Its not comfortable, its hard to concentrate, but progress can be made. I have successfully used this tool to observe real performance problems, and confirm they've been resolved.

JtSysMon is a very simple monitoring tool which will poll resources and time the response. The response time is logged to a database, and from there, you can see which resources are either slow or failing/erroring.

I wrote this because I needed a way to make sure that various resources were available and responsive during development, so that we could respond quickly (proactively) to problems and have them fixed before developers or testers noticed or wasted time fault finding.

Existing solutions (Nagios, Zenoss etc) seemed too complex for such a simple requirement, with too much of a learning curve and setup required for essentially what is polling HTTP and SQL (please correct me if I am wrong).

Install

Checkout from https://github.com/prule/javathinking-sysmon. Use maven to build it and extract the binary archive so that you have a directory structure like:

- jtsysmon
|- bin
|- conf
|- lib

By default, an embedded instance of the DERBY database will be used to store the configuration and poll results. If you want, you can edit conf/database.properties to point to another database. If you do, you will have to add the database driver jar file to the lib dir.

Configure

JtSysMon currently comes with 2 monitor types - SqlMonitor and HttpMonitor.

To configure a monitor, specify the class, a name, and then properties of the class as required. Reflection is used to set the properties of the class:

sh run.sh add name=sql1 class=com.javathinking.jtsysmon.core.monitor.SqlMonitor driverClass=org.hibernate.dialect.DerbyDialect connectionString=jdbc:derby://localhost:1527/jtsysmon "sql=select count(*) from APP.MONITORCONFIG"

sh run.sh add name=http1 class=com.javathinking.jtsysmon.core.monitor.HttpMonitor url=http://localhost/ checkFor=Hello

To list the monitors, use:

sh run.sh -list

Listing monitors

1048576 sql1
class = class com.javathinking.jtsysmon.core.monitor.SqlMonitor
connectionString = jdbc:derby://localhost:1527/jtsysmon
driverClass = org.hibernate.dialect.DerbyDialect
sql = select count(*) from APP.MONITORCONFIG

To delete a monitor, use delete, with the ID of the monitor (shown in the listing above):

sh run.sh -delete 1048576

To start monitoring, use:

sh run.sh -start

Use CTRL-C to stop.

To view alarms (where the time taken to perform poll exceeds a specified value) or problems (where the poll failed or errored) use:

sh run.sh -alarms -threshold 5 -period 20

Listing events over last 20 minutes

ALARMS (duration > 5)

19:08:18 paul-laptop1 sql1 28ms SUCCESS

PROBLEMS (non-successful events)

19:08:21 paul-laptop1 http1 90ms  ERROR

Summary

So there you have it - a bare bones way to check connectivity, response times, and availability of resources in your environment. This is meant only as a development tool, NOT for monitoring production resources.

Futures

If there is any interest from the community in using this tool, you could easily imagine:

• multiple agents logging to a central database
• more monitors
  • snmp
  • ssh
  • scripts
• a web client
  • to display alarms and graphs of response times
  • to configure the monitors
• notifiers to alert users of problems

For the latest information, see the source code (and README.TXT) at:

• https://github.com/prule/javathinking-sysmon