#18 Reading in JAMon data from a file

[Steve Souza]

Hi Jamon-guys

I have a suggestion for JAMon, which could quite
enhance its attractiveness even more. JAMon is a great
and very simple to use API. The only thing that I find
quite inconvenient is that you have to include the
jamon.war in your application to monitor performance.
In production systems you have to shield urls to
jamonadmin, deployers sometimes do not accept the
deployment of an alian-jamon.war, each jamon monitor
only can show statistical information of the
MonitorFactory running in the same JVM and not of
others, etc., etc.

This inconvenience can easily be removed by:

1. Provide a marshalling mechanism with which you can
extract the data from the MonitorFactory, preferably to
an asci format e.g. base64 encoding (this mechanism is
already kind of available)

2. NEW: provide an unmarshalling mechanism so that the
extracted data can be read in in another MonitorFactory.

Advantage: by doing so, an MBean (JMX) can expose a
method, by which the marshalled data of the
MonitorFactory can be accessed and unmarshalled in
another JVM, preferably the one where jamonadmin is
running.

As a matter of fact, I have done something like this at
one of my projects:

A: I wrote a marshalling mechanism, which hexed the
whole MonitorFactory

B: Had an MBean expose this data

C: Had an MBean-client in the jamonadmin who retrieved
the data remotely and displayed it (JMX in Webshpere
including security)

HOWEVER: my marshalling mechanism was – due to lack of
time – was not really advanced: I simply made all the
classes java.io.Serializable, serialized the whole
MonitorFactory, hex-ed it and unhex-ed & deserialized
it at the client side. This approach is in my eyes not
preferable at all, since you only want to serialize the
data and no objects that change over time.

My suggestion: at the time when I wrote the above code,
I could not easily find a way to ONLY marshall &
unmarshall the data hold by the MonitorFactory. Since
you know the code much beter it could be a piece of
cake for you to write such a mechanism. The rest, e.g.
JMX part won’t be very difficult anymore.

I hope this suggestion helps to improve JAMon!

Keep on the good work!

Urs Peter: UPeter attt xebia dottt commmm

[Steve Souza]

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user_id=828052

The next release will have the ability to read jamon data in
from a text file. More details to come. Hopefully the next
release will be in the next couple months.