Gaining Visibility Into Enterprise Spring Applications with tc ServerSpring Edition #s2gx

Gaining Visibility Into Enterprise Spring Applications with tc Server Spring EditionSteve Mayzak – SpringSource

tc Server — enterprise version of Tomcat developed by SpringSource
Built on Tomcat
Survey in 2008: 68% of companies surveyed using Tomcat; most popular lightweight container

tc Server editions

developer edition — can get it when you download STS
standard edition — application provisioning, server administration, advanced diagnostics
spring edition — spring + tomcat stack, spring application visibility, spring performance management

tc Server: Key Highlights

Spring Insight

Spring Insight — knows about Spring and Grails applications, so can provide specific information about your apps as they’re running
When you deploy a WAR to tc Server, Spring Insight gets involved and get get specific information from your apps
Spring Insight is currently intended for development use only
DEMO: huge amount of details come out of Spring Insight, from the HTTP request details down to the JDBC statements that were run and timings on the various actions during the request
can use Insight with other frameworks, etc. as well by adding annotations to your code

Operational Control

performance & sla management of spring apps
application provisioning and server administration
rich alert definition, workflows, and control actions
group availability & event dashboards
secure unidirectional agent communications
tc Server is a combination of Hyperic and Tomcat
monitoring is done via valves in Tomcat–isn’t a fork or modified version of Tomcat
Hyperic monitors web servers, app servers, databases, caching, messaging, directories, virtualization, etc.
Hyperic is also a management tool–admin, provisioning, groups, metrics, alerts, events, access control, upgrades, etc.

Enterprise Capabilities in tc Server

tc Server instances can point to a central set of binaries so upgrades are simpler

Can create tc Server templates and create multiple instances from a base template
Advanced diagnostics–detects deadlocks and slow-running requests

Hyperic

monitoring and deployment
can see what apps are running on tc Server, number of sessions on the apps, up/down times, etc.
can deploy war files and change context path as you deploy
can schedule deployments and have the server auto-restart
can deploy from a remote machine (e.g. build server)
can remotely stop/start/restart instances
can set up scheduled restarts–e.g. make configuration changes during the day, have server auto-restart after hours
can schedule recurring restarts (e.g. restart daily at 1 am)
hyperic consumes jmx metrics and can show them in context, meaning it shows application metrics in the context of the overall server health (cpu, memory, etc.)
with the metrics coming in you can look at the specifics of your application and tune according to what your specific application is doing

has everything from cpu, memory, disk I/O metrics, to request metrics, down to spring-specific metrics

can add JMX instrumentation to your own classes without having to write your own MBeans–just annotate with @ManagedResource, @ManagedMetric, @ManagedOperation, @ManagedAttribute

this lets you get down to questions like “how many bookings per second can I handle in my travel booking application?” which lets you plan infrastructure and scalability in a very granular way

hyperic does metric baselining for your specific app so you’ll get alerts based on the baseline metrics for your application
can enable/disable metrics and alerts across multiple servers from a single interface
can see metrics globally (across a cluster) or individually on each server

Deployment Flexibility

Lean server (10MB) for virtual environments
template-drive server instance creation
integrated experience with vmware environments
open, secure API for all operations
server-specific settings like ports, etc. have been taken out and put into a catalina properties file, so server.xml can be applicable to all servers
streamlines process of spinning up new server instances
shared binaries for upgrades
multiple server versions can be installed per machine
complete flexibility for various “sizes” of VMs

Matt Woodward