MarsJUG and RivieraDEV retrospective

A blog post by Thomas Segismont

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Recently, I gave a talk in French at the Marseille Java User Group and did it again last week at the RivieraDEV conference. The presentation was called "Tenir ses applications à l’oeil avec Hawkular Metrics" ("Keep an eye on your applications with Hawkular Metrics").

I’m a MarsJUG aficionado, so it was fun to be on the other side of the desk. But it was my first time at RivieraDEV, and I have to say I was quite impressed. The organization team did an awesome job, and the sessions I’ve attended were all very interesting. Needless to say, a conference located in the French Riviera has some advantages…​

I was well surprised to see the room packed for my presentation, as the RivieraDEV audience was mostly comprised of developers, not system administrators. This is a good sign: more and more, monitoring tools draw attention of the development side.

I came back home with very good feedback from the attendees.

Interoperability idea validated

One of the nicest questions I was asked at RivieraDEV was, in the following or similar terms:

I’m interested but I have Nagios everywhere, and I won’t remove it. Can I use Hawkular with it?

While we haven’t worked on Nagios interoperability yet, we have a tool called PTrans, which listens to metric data sent over several common protocols (graphite and collectd among others).

So Nagios integration is possible, and would be a very nice contribution (subliminal message).

Dashboards

It’s one thing to store data, but of course everyone wants to do something with it! So the ability to work with Grafana on top of Hawkular Metrics was appreciated. And as promised to a participant, there’s now a guide for the setup.

But we’re also working on our own charting Javascript library, so you’ll be soon be able to create your own dashboards or embed graphs in your applications.

OpenTSDB comparison

At the MarsJUG as well as RivieraDEV, I was asked how Hawkular Metrics relates to OpenTSDB, and why we don’t use OpenTSDB.

Here’s my own opinion:

  1. It is similar in goals, I think: being simple to use (from a client), and capable of ingesting and storing loads of data.

  2. With the RHQ project, we have experience in storing metric data in Apache Cassandra; it fits our known needs, so from a user/customer support perspective, it feels more comfortable to me.

  3. Hawkular Metrics can run on Microsoft Windows out-of-the-box; as far as I know, OpenTSDB cannot; and this platform is not a niche for us.

  4. Hawkular Metrics is probably simpler to administrate in small environments, because you don’t have to deploy HBase.

That’s it. You can review the slides online or download them.

If you attended one the sessions, I hope you enjoyed it. And see you next year hopefully!




Published by Thomas Segismont on 17 June 2015

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