At OC Systems, we have watched with great interest the roll-out and maturation of Red Hat's OpenShift platform. On the RTI development team we were quick to see the tremendous advantages of OpenShift's quick and easy application stack deployment. While we don't do production application development on the RTI team, we are continually developing internal test applications and deploying to varied application platforms. Furthermore, we are always looking to test RTI with new application technologies and frameworks and in new platforms. OpenShift allows all application developers to quickly define and deploy application stacks with new and proven technologies, including quick-start sample applications (great for test development). OpenShift includes many other features which support a mature and managed development process from IDE integration to build management and version control.
Of course, we saw a great opportunity to deploy our RTI Application Performance Management (APM) tool to the OpenShift environment--if you're doing JBoss application development in OpenShift, then you need RTI! The OpenShift cartridge system was the obvious route to deploying RTI in OpenShift. Now we moved from the role of test application development to OpenShift cartridge developer. We started this effort just as the version 2 cartridge specification came online, and were able to make quick work of the cartridge. It's not surprising how simple this was, after all, that's the whole point of cartridges from a cartridge developer's point of view--make it easy to extend OpenShift with new services. We did have trouble setting up a local test environment, but--OpenShift to the rescue--the new downloadable cartridge feature allowed us to test the cartridge on openshift.com without having to stand up our own OpenShift environment first. We were able to make quick work of the RTI cartridge testing.
The RTI Cartridge for OpenShift
Now OC Systems offers the RTI Cartridge for OpenShift at www.rtiperformance.com. The RTI cartridge is easy to add to an existing OpenShift JBoss or Tomcat application, simply add the downloadable RTI cartridge, install the license, and restart your application. At that point, RTI begins to automatically discover business transactions (requests) entering your JBoss application, and, once discovered, RTI begins collecting rate and response time metrics for those transactions and collects a summary profile that aggregates the performance of all the transactions entering your application. RTI can also collect a deep-dive trace to record method-level diagnostic information for individual transaction instances and resource usage metrics during that time. The RTI Console is used to connect to your OpenShift application gear to control RTI data collection and to download and analyze the RTI performance information. The RTI Console includes a number of analysis features and supports sharing raw performance data and reports generated from that data.
The current version of the RTI cartridge supports collecting data for single OpenShift gears. OpenShift developers can manually scale up their application to multiple gears and RTI will collect data for each gear separately. We look forward to future OpenShift releases that support shared (file system) data areas between gears that we can use to support RTI monitoring in automatically scaling applications. We are sure OpenShift will continue to add features and services that will be of interest to application developers and therefore to the RTI team. We can't wait.
RTI Downloadable Cartridge for OpenShift Overview
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