Tomcat on Windows - Free profiling and metrics gathering tools?

Question

Hi there

We're using Windows 2008 and we are thinking of switching application servers from Adobe ColdFusion 9 to Railo 3.1. This would mean using a new Java servlet container, so instead of Adobe JRun 4, we're looking at Apache Tomcat.

Adobe have a helpful perfmon plugin for CF9. We can gather most stats with that. The problem is, as far as I understand, there is no perfmon plugin for Tomcat.

I wanted to know if there are any kind of free profiling tools we can use to get metrics and performance data on Tomcat, for example requests/sec, memory usage etc.

I don't mind if they are just written to logs so long as we can read them in some format. Also, it doesn't have to be a stand-alone product.

Any and all help appreciated!

Answer 1

Just curious - which application server are you using now? Which one uses perfmon now?

Because you've got to run Tomcat on an operating system - Windows, Linux, etc. You seem to imply that perfmon is useless to you now. I don't believe that's the case.

If you need to embellish info from perfmon, you can certainly buy something. But the cheapest solution for you would be filters that would intercept every incoming request and outgoing response to calculate request counts, response time, etc. You'd write these classes once and declare them in your web.xml. They could write to logs using log4j.

Or maybe Hyperic's solution is what you have in mind. It used to be open source, but Spring bought them a few years back. Then VMWare bought Spring. It's all part of a grander solution.

Answer 2

LambdaProbe will give you monitoring for sessions, memory used, web app sessions and servlets, connections etc.

Take a look at the demo site http://demo.lambdaprobe.org/ for more.

Site login: demo/demo