Wow! This is a very useful product

First of all, my apologies to the jManage users for not being active in the jManage community in the last 6 months. My job at Care.com has kept me very busy.

We actually use jManage in the production environment of Care.com. We use it to monitor our JBoss application servers, and also the long running command-line processes.

jManage has proven most useful when generating alerts in case of errors in the command-line processes. We have extended the JDK logging (java.util.logging.Handler) to generate MBean notifications when "SEVERE" level error is logged. This helps us sleep better at night, as know that jManage is up watching the processes for us.

I was adding another command-line process to our production jManage instance today, and I couldn't stop myself from admiring what the jManage community has built. Now that I am very active user of jManage, I find it a very useful product.

PS: I will try to get some screen shots of our jManage instance at Care.com.

Merging JBoss and JDK1.5 MBeans under one MBeanServer

As per the following issue logged on JBoss, it seems like the new versions of JBoss support registering the JBoss MBeans in the JDK 1.5 MBeanServer:

http://jira.jboss.com/jira/browse/JBAS-1610

It says:

To enable this feature use: './run -Djboss.platform.mbeanserver'
and see the 'java.lang' and 'java.util.logging' domains appearing in the jmx-console

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

jManage.org --> second most popular site with JMX tag

It is interesting to find that jManage.org is the second most popular site tagged with the keyword "JMX" on del.icio.us:

http://del.icio.us/popular/jmx

del.icio.us provides a "tag" based mechanism to search content.

Get notified on new jManage releases

jmanage-announce is the new mailing list for notification on new releases.
Please subscribe to get notified about the new releases:

http://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/jmanage-announce

If you have already subscribed to jmanage-users mailing list,
there is no need to subscribe to jmanage-announce.

When a new version of jManage is available, notification will be sent to both
jmanage-users and jmanage-announce mailing lists.

jmanage-announce is a low volume mailing list, limited to just release notifications.

jManage 1.0.1 released

jManage 1.0.1 is the first maitenance release in the 1.0 series, with some important bug fixes and new features.

You can download 1.0.1 from:

http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=111374&package_id=166109&release_id=380773

Changes:

Feature Requests:

1389736 - Add support for modifying array data types
1378203 - Improve the display of array data types
1388556 - Add support for Formatting data based on CompositeType
1374698 - Can't see exception contents when operation fails
1374980 - Include both *.cmd and *.sh in .gz and .zip distributions

Bugs fixed:

1380782 - NPE in AuthServiceImpl.login
1378197 - Connection not being closed during graph view
1379756 - cannot view EJB 3.0 info on JBoss
1379511 - buttons look like inactive

jManage 1.0 final released

We are pleased to announce the release of jManage 1.0 final. This is a result of a lot of hard work by the jManage contributors and feedback from the jManage users.

jManage is a open source, web and command-line based JMX client, which provides a centralized console for managing application clusters and distributed-application environments. jManage goes beyond an ordinary JMX client by providing features like Alerts, Graphs, Security, SNMP support, etc. The jManage mission is to provide an open source management platform, which can be used to manage and monitor complete production environment.

We recommend that you upgrade from 0.5 release to 1.0, to make use of new features like Alerts, Graphs, SNMP support, etc.
jManage 1.0 can be downloaded from:

http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=111374&package_id=166109&release_id=375944

Following is a list of new features in 1.0:

- Graphs
- Alerts
- Basic SNMP support.
- Support for Open MBean types: CompositeData and TabularData.
- Framework to define DataFormat objects for custom classes.
See html-data-format.properties and text-data-format.properties under config.
- Support for external login modules (JAAS based with name and password callback)
- Changes to application type management (introduced application-type-config.xml)
- Changed jmanage startup to use jetty-config.xml. This moves the jmanage port
configuration and also the SSL configuration to jetty-config.xml. Please
refer Jetty documentation to modify this file.
- Added exception handling for JSPs.
- Added support for viewing XML files.
- New components based source structure. The build is now done using Maven.

To see a complete list of features, please visit http://www.jmanage.org.

Please send an email to team@jmanage.org with feedback.

Regards,
Rakesh Kalra

jManage 1.0 beta2 is now available

You can download jManage 1.0 beta2 here.

Release Notes :

This is the beta2 release of the much awaited 1.0 version. Please see jManage home page for the list of features in 1.0.

To upgrade an existng jManage installation, please copy all files from the old jmanage_home/config dir to the new jmanage_home/config dir. E.g. copy files from jmanage-0.5.4/config to jmanage-1.0-beta2/config dir ("cp -r" on unix does the trick).
Please make sure you copy all files, specially "jmanage-key".

The following 0.5 install guide still holds good (except that the port number is now configured in jetty-config.xml):

http://jmanage.org/documentation/jmanage0.5/install.html

Changes since 1.0 beta :

Feature Requests:

1333311 - Add to Application, etc, via Wildcard Reference
1357757 - Improve graphing module by adding yaxis label & scale factor

Bugs Fixed:

1350519 - NPE in connectionFailed.jsp
1354263 - Cluster level operations don't work in 1.0 beta
1351764 - #!/bin/sh needs to be first line in shell scripts
1350515 - keygen.sh does not work

Using jManage 1.0 to connect to JDK 1.5

JDK1.5 exposes mangement information via a set of MBean registered in the platform MBeanServer. jManage can be used to manage and monitor a JDK 1.5 application.

To enable a JDK 1.5 application for remote monitoring, add the following system properties to your JDK1.5 application:

-Dcom.sun.management.jmxremote.port=9999
-Dcom.sun.management.jmxremote.authenticate=false
-Dcom.sun.management.jmxremote.ssl=false

Add this application in jManage as a JSR160 application with the following URL:

service:jmx:rmi:///jndi/rmi://localhost:9999/jmxrmi

You will see that you can monitor and manage ClassLoading, Memory, Threads, etc. You can even change the log level of your application, if your application uses JDK logging API.

Note that it is important to enable authentication for your production JDK1.5 application. To enable authentication and access control, please read this.

jManage will continue to use Apache 2.0 license

jManage was considering moving to LGPL, starting with 1.0 release. Based on the user feedback, jManage team has decided to continue with the Apache 2.0 license.

We have also started releasing 1.0 builds under Apache 2.0. These are available for download here.