GlassFish Performance Monitoring Tool

GlassFish monitoring is the ongoing process of measuring the health and availability of GlassFish, a popular application server.

GlassFish is an open-source Java application server that can also be used as a web server. This free software has evolved since its original release in 1996. While currently hosted by the Eclipse Foundation and supported by Oracle, Red Hat, and Payara, there have been versions of GlassFish available through names like Oracle GlassFish Server and Sun GlassFish Enterprise Server.

Today, GlassFish is a common choice as a Java Enterprise Edition (EE) certified application server. It’s often deployed as a server for Java applications or as a web server for production or development environments. Teams may find they can easily test and develop web services with GlassFish.

Since GlassFish is a popular choice of server for Java applications, it’s critical to have insight into GlassFish server performance metrics. GlassFish monitoring can allow you to view and track key server metrics like memory usage, so you can address or prevent application performance problems before they impact business productivity.

It’s possible to perform manual GlassFish monitoring to obtain basic insights into the performance and health of your GlassFish server and related applications. You can perform manual GlassFish monitoring through the command-line utility, for Oracle or Eclipse instances, which allows you to check various statistics related to how GlassFish is operating.

Built-in administration tools for GlassFish monitoring include the Administration Console, the asadmin utility, REST interfaces, the OSGi Module Management Subsystem, the keytool utility, and the Java Monitoring and Management Console.

However, comprehensive GlassFish monitoring works best when you can gain a fuller picture of GlassFish performance and health, including Java-specific metrics, alongside other key system metrics, such as:

• Average response time
• Memory pool statistics
• JVM memory and heap usage
• Class statistics
• Thread pools
• Enterprise Java Bean (EJB) pool statistics
• Java Database Connectivity (JDBC) connection pool statistics
• Session statistics
• Servlet session counts
• Custom MBeans attributes via JMX

Without gaining an understanding of performance across your environment, it can be more difficult to diagnose a bottleneck because you’ll need to dig through metrics in various interfaces to determine the overall issue, recognize emerging issues, and be proactive in troubleshooting. Using an automated server and application monitoring tool can make tracking GlassFish metrics easier.

GlassFish monitoring is critical for businesses wanting to maintain application performance, particularly Java applications, dependent on GlassFish servers. GlassFish applications need to be available, responsive, and scalable, and effective GlassFish monitoring can provide the information you need to keep systems healthy.

When performance issues occur, an effective GlassFish monitoring solution can help speed MTTR and successful troubleshooting outcomes by monitoring GlassFish memory metrics, which can allow you to quickly see whether metrics like memory usage have strayed from the baseline over time or is currently spiking. With this visibility, you can dig down into other metrics and dependencies to better diagnose, troubleshoot, and resolve the problem, such as changing memory allocations or addressing processes consuming too much memory.

With GlassFish monitoring in place, you can help prevent and minimize potentially costly application and server slowdowns and help ensure productivity.

A GlassFish monitoring tool is designed to help you monitor the performance of GlassFish servers and applications and more easily diagnose issues.

Monitoring tools can offer customizable dashboards with intuitive features designed to help provide at-a-glance visibility into GlassFish with built-in and customizable component monitors. These monitors can track and record key real-time or historical metrics across servers like GlassFish and the applications running on them to provide you with insight into user experience and performance bottlenecks in a single view.

When gathering GlassFish metrics, you can also set baselines for expected performance, then configure alerts to be automatically sent if these thresholds are met, so someone can quickly start troubleshooting.

SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor (SAM) is a GlassFish monitoring solution designed to enable performance and availability monitoring for servers and applications. SAM is built for monitoring across multiple operating systems, so you can monitor GlassFish servers in Linux, Windows, or Mac OS X in a centralized view.

SAM is built to help you more easily track relevant Java metrics for GlassFish servers and applications along with other important health metrics to provide performance visibility across an infrastructure. With over 1,200 available monitoring templates, SAM can monitor KPIs for GlassFish alongside other servers, like Oracle and JBoss, from a single interface. These templates are designed to monitor GlassFish server statistics through the JMX protocol, or you can use the Orion agent for Linux or agentless monitoring via SNMP. You can also choose to use a pre-built or customize an existing GlassFish monitoring template to quickly start monitoring relevant metrics.

SAM offers customizable dashboards designed to improve your visibility into GlassFish servers and applications. Intuitive charts, graphs, and dependency maps help ensure you can quickly identify where issues exist. Click-through features can also make it easier to drill down on specific issues, so you get the information you need to start troubleshooting as soon as possible. In addition, you can set up custom, threshold-based alerts on GlassFish metrics, so you’re notified of emerging performance issues in real time.

If you’re looking for an all-in-one GlassFish solution, SAM is built to provide great value for your money, with monitoring, reporting, and alerting in one product.