Application Monitoring

Tomcat Server

Optimizing Performance and Availability of Web Applications

Introduction

Open source products have achieved a level of market penetration and deployment sophistication that would have been unimaginable just a few years ago. Today, Tomcat, a free open-source Java server, is increasingly being used in enterprise deployments in which high-end application servers like WebLogic and WebSphere would have been traditionally been deployed.

As the product gets deployed in increasingly large-scale, mission-critical deployments, administrators often find that Tomcat’s inherent complexity and lack of bundled monitoring capabilities present real challenges—making it time consuming and difficult to ensure optimal performance, scalability, and availability.

How can administrators efficiently monitor multiple Tomcat servers in distributed environments, and ensure they’re performing optimally? How can they gain the insights they need to proactively manage the performance of these open source systems?

The Solution

The NimBUS Tomcat probe helps organizations gain enterprise-grade performance and availability from their Tomcat servers. With NimBUS, administrators can centrally monitor any number of distributed servers, and ensure that any potential issues or irregularities are detected at the earliest possible stage.

Features

• Robust, intuitive management interface makes all administrative tasks fast and easy
  
• Enables central management of multiple Tomcat servers
  
• Includes automatic resource discovery capabilities for simplified management configuration
  
• Supports agentless monitoring of Tomcat servers running on any supported platform

Benefits

• Enjoy cost and time savings through streamlined, centralized administration of complex Web environments
  
• Boost operational efficiency through improved resource visibility and capacity management
  
• Ensure SLA compliance of business critical services

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The quality of service data provided by the NimBUS Tomcat probe makes it possible to detect performance trends, enabling administrators to take precautionary actions before users notice any service degradation, and so more effectively optimize performance and availability.

The NimBUS Tomcat probe offers an array of features specifically designed to make it easy to configure and manage the monitoring of large, distributed Tomcat environments:

• Agentless monitoring. Utilizing Tomcat’s native JMX interface, the NimBUS Tomcat probe gathers a wealth of availability and performance metrics—without requiring any agents or other software to be added to the Web server host.
• Automatic discovery. The NimBUS Tomcat probe automatically discovers the Tomcat installation on a host machine, as well as all sub components.
• Centralized administration. With NimBUS, administrators can monitor any number of servers through a single, intuitive interface.

Monitoring Features that Yield Practical Insights

The NimBUS Tomcat probe …

• Offers central, agentless monitoring of multiple Tomcat servers.
• Monitors server performance and response time, and status of individual requested resources.
• Monitors standard and custom-developed MBeans.
• Enables real-time alerts that ensure administrators are apprised immediately of issues.
• Provides quality of service data for trend analysis.
• Monitors compliance with service level agreements.

With these robust capabilities, administrators can …

• Detect Tomcat server problems and degradations more quickly.
• Immediately identify the source of bottlenecks and failures.
• More proactively control service levels and minimize downtime.

Requirements

Requires JSR 160 and Java 1.5 or above

Checkpoints Monitored

The list of all checkpoints available for monitoring with the NimBUS Tomcat probe is too long to include here.  Following is a subset of the list, featuring some of the more broadly relevant checkpoints: