Simon Roberts

Dancing Cloud Services

Management, Monitoring, and Performance with Java 5+

Java provides a wide range of APIs that assist with common, and not so common, programming problems, but until recently the production environment was largely ignored. This has caused some difficult problems in deployed systems, particularly where the deployment environment differs significantly from that used for development and testing. Java 5 introduced the JConsole tool that can be used to monitor key aspects of a system's behavior.

This session investigates JConsole, discussing the key system aspects that can be watched in a running VM. Emphasis is on those aspects, such as garbage collection and thread behavior, that are most likely to impact performance in a production installation.

Management, Monitoring, and Deployment of Tomcat and JBoss

The J2EE system has some major benefits for the production of enterprise scale software, notably the ability to handle massive scale through clustering. On the other hand, however, some aspects of the container approach can cause problems of their own. In particular the monitoring of aspects such as connection count and memory use can be critical to the healthy running of a production system.

This session investigates the administration of Tomcat and JBoss servers. Configuration of a JBoss cluster and the use of the mod_jk for load balancing of requests through Tomcat is introduced. The session then examines the monitoring of running systems, allowing abnormal conditions to be detected and if possible corrected, hopefully before they cause performance or avaialbility problems.