Today I attended the JBoss ON the Road stop in Dallas, TX. I have to say it was a great seminar. It was well organizied, the presentations were better then good, and no time was wasted (we installed JBoss ON during lunch).
The schedule looked like it was geared to Application Server admins, but the last session really got my attention (more on it further down this post) so for the price (it’s free) I thought I would attend.
The main point of the seminar, in case the name doesn’t give it away, was JBoss wanting to show off their ON (Operations Network) product. Let me say, I was very impressed with this product. It’s a very slick web-based monitoring tool that includes an interface for doing a ton of admin tasks, also.
You install the server piece to ON on one box and the clients on your other boxes. The server will auto-detect a lot of servers (JBoss AS, Tomcat, etc) and then you go and set up all kinds of alerts for those servers. I won’t go into any more detail here, but I’d recommend you read the info on the JBoss site.
I must add that my excitement for JBoss ON was really high when I read about JBoss open sourcing the ON product, but then one of the speakers rained on my parade by saying he wasn’t sure about the open-sourcing details, and didn’t think the whole product would be release for free. I’m going to enquire on the specifics of the open sourcing announcement.
Easily, the highlight of the seminar was the final session by Chris DeLashmutt on Performance Tuning JBoss on Linux. The session is the main reason I attended because I have worked/work with a client running JBoss on Linux and need some pointers on tuning the install. Chris’ session was SO MUCH MORE then tuning JBoss.
The Performance Tuning session was really a server agnostic talk (until the very end) on how to design, test, deploy, and tune Java/J2EE distributed applications. Chris did an outstanding job talking about tuning garbage collection, the heap, and the jvm stack with the various jvm parameters. He gave a top notch discussion on the specifics of the various garbage collection options and when to use them.
The perf tuning session was 90 minutes of goodness. So good I talked to Chris and the event coordinator about bringing somebody, hopefully Chris, back to Dallas to do the talk for JavaMUG.
Good times…
You might like this too: https://rhstack.108.redhat.com/articles/2006/09/18/java-performance-tuning-on-linux-with-andrew-oliver.html
Andy,
Thanks for stopping by, and thanks for the link. That is another great resource.
Erik
Thank you very much for the review! I very much enjoyed delivering that presentation for the group.
No problem, Chris. It was a dang good seminar!