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The software establishes a simple, customizable agent on a piece of middleware that can report measurements and activity on the application related to its operational health.
By Charles Babcock, InformationWeek, May 8 2008, 1100 hrs
Red Hat introduced JBoss Operations Network 2.0 for managing JBoss Middleware on Tuesday, the opening day of JavaOne.
Operations Network is a three-year old product line that gives a central management console to the JBoss middleware set, which includes JBoss Application Server, JBoss Hibernate and JBoss Seam. Operations Network 2.0 can "collect data, establish baselines for operations and set alerting mechanisms if baseline metrics are not met," said Katrinka McCallum, VP of Red Hat Management Solutions.
Operations Network establishes a simple, customizable agent on a piece of middleware that can report measurements and activity on the application related to its operational health. The agents enable a detailed audit trail of any changes to the middleware to be established, allowing managers to rollback an application server or other component to a more stable version if trouble develops, she said.
Although dubbed "operations," the management system is designed to be applied to Java application development, testing and deployment, as well as actual operations. By being able to measure the efficiency of a new application running with middleware, troubleshooting and performance improvements can take place before deployment to production, she said.
Performance of the middleware and the applications its managing can be viewed through a Web-based console. Simple dashboard indicators, such as a red light or green light, tell whether middleware and applications are performing as expected, what the number of active process threads is, how memory is being consumed. "There are quite a few stats you can drill down into," she said.
The management server to agent communications can be encrypted for secure operations.
Pricing on annual subscriptions to Operations Network 2.0 run from $12,500 to $50,000, depending on size of servers and level of technical support sought.
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