jManage 2.0 beta is now available

We are very excited to announce the availability of jManage 2.0 beta.

We have decided to change the version number from 1.5 to 2.0 to better reflect the level of maturity and stability in this release, as well as many new features which transform jManage from a JMX console to a management platform.

2.0 beta contains the following major features:
- Improved dashboard framework, with two Java 5 dashboards.
- Connector framework for non-JMX applications, with a sample Oracle database connector.
- Application downtime tracking with ability to setup alerts when an application goes down.
- WebLogic 9.x support is now part of this release. This was earlier provided as a patch.
- UI Improvements.

There is documentation available on dashboards and connectors at http://www.jmanage.org/wiki.

A number of bugs found in 1.5 beta, have been fixed in this release. Please see the release notes for more info:
http://sourceforge.net/project/shownotes.php?release_id=464022&group_id=111374

You can download this release from:
http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=111374&package_id=211715&release_id=464022

We will now be working towards the next 2.0 release with:
a) Historical graphing.
b) Dashboards for major J2EE application servers.
c) More Bug fixes.

Best Regards,

The jManage Team

jManage 1.0 Documentation

jManage Documentation is now being maintained on the following wiki:

http://jmanage.org/wiki/index.php/Documentation

You can also make changes to this documentation after you login.

Hibernate Stats with jManage

You can configure Hibernate to expose statistics of a Hibernate SessionFactory via JMX. Please see the hibernate documentation for more information:

Before you can look at Hibernate stats via jManage, you need to copy hibernate-3.1.jar to JMANAGE_HOME/lib folder, and restart jManage.

Following is an example of getting Second Level Cache statistics for a cached entity.

Weblogic 9.x support in jManage 1.0.4

The following patch file adds Weblogic 9.x support to jManage 1.0.4:

jmanage-1.0.4-wl9-patch.zip

This file is available as part of the jManage 1.0.4 release:

http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=111374&package_id=166109

After applying the patch, you will have to copy WL_HOME\server\lib\weblogic.jar to JMANAGE_HOME\modules\weblogic9.

SNMP Support in jManage 1.0.4

jManage 1.0.4 supports SNMP version 1 with "public" community string. As jManage tries to map the SNMP information to MBeans, it uses snmp-oids.properties file to map SNMP OIDs to MBean attribute names.

Currently, snmp-oids.properties file contains Solaris OIDs. If you add more OIDs here, please share them with the community.

SNMP support is primitive at this point, and we are looking to get some feedback from you. Please let us know if you use jManage to connect to a SNMP device, and what improvements you are looking for.

jManage is not a replacement for a Network Management System like OpenNMS, but it tries to provide read-only view of some interesting attribute values.

jManage 1.0.4 released

jManage 1.0.4 is a maintenance release in the 1.0 series, with some bug fixes and improved support for SNMP.

Currently jManage only supports SNMP version 1 with "public" community name. The SNMP OIDs are configured in snmp-oids.properties. Currently, this file only contains Solaris OIDs. You can add more OIDs to this file.

You can download jManage 1.0.4 at:

http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=111374&package_id=166109&release_id=402532


Changes:

Bugs fixed:

1392503 - SNMP port entered through UI is not being used
1445291 - .sh files do not work with cygwin
1431102 - Allow other users with admin access to unlock "admin" user
1445126 - jManage fails with quoted object names
1452904 - Rename "weblogic61" to "weblogic" in application-type-config

Feature Requests:

1419292 - Allow users to add custom classpath to jmanage classpath
1452896 - SNMP: Support for Solaris OIDs

Nominate jManage for 2006 SF.net Community Choice Awards

SourceForge is collecting nominations for 2006 Community Choice Awards. If you like jManage,
please take a second to nominate jManage:

http://www.wilsonresearch.com/2006/ostgawards06/ostgawards12.php

Nominations must be entered by March 15th.

jManage Alerts with JBoss

Before setting up Alerts in jManage for JBoss, you need to copy "jmanage-jboss.jar" from <jmanage-home>/modules/jboss to <jboss-server-config>/lib.

For example, if you are running the "default" JBoss server configuration, copy this jar to: <jboss-home>/server/default/lib.

You will need to restart JBoss, after copying the file.

Also note that jManage comes with JBoss 3.2.4 jars. If you are connecting to JBoss 4.0, you need to copy the 4.0 jars to <jmanage-home>/modules/jboss directory.

jManage configuration files you should know about

jManage configuration files can be found under the config directory. You can modify some of these files to customize jManage for your needs.

Following is a list of important jManage configuration files and their usages:

config.xml
This files contains the configured applications, alerts, graphs, etc.
You will normaly not edit this file by hand.

jmanage-key
This file contains the key encrypted using the admin password.

jmanage-users.xml
Contains jManage users.

jmanage-user-roles.xml
Edit this file to add more roles.

acl-config.properties
Contains access control list. See this doc for more information.

jetty-config.xml
The Jetty configuration file. You will need to edit this file if you want to change the default port for jManage. See Jetty documentation for more information.

jmanage.properties
General jManage configurations.

logging.properties
jManage uses JDK logging system. This the JDK logging configuration file.

html-data-format.properties
Data format configurations for web interface.

text-data-format.properties
Data format configurations for command-line interface.

jmanage-auth.conf
JAAS authentication configuration file.

external-user-roles.properties
User to role mapping, if you have configured a different authentication module in jmanage-auth.conf.

An introduction to jManage 1.0

There is a good article on JavaWorld which introduces readers to the features of jManage JMX client using J2SE 5.0 MBeans as examples. You can read the article here.

Connecting to a "Cluster" using jManage

Zarar Siddiqi has written an article titled "Using JMX and J2SE 5.0 to Securely Manage Web Applications". This article includes the cluster
management feature of jmanage:

http://today.java.net/pub/a/today/2005/11/15/using-jmx-to-manage-web-applications.html?page=2#jmanage