Tomcat manager/admin apps on multiple $CATALINA_BASES

Question

A couple of queries regarding the Tomcat manager and admin apps.

I have tomcat no a development area configured to run multiple catalina bases. Basically each user has their own $CATALINA_BASE and can do their own delopment or testing on their area. The directory structure is currently as follows

Env1 - $CATALINA_BASE - /u/tomcatenv/user1
Env2 - $CATALINA_BASE - /u/tomcatenv/user2
Env3 - $CATALINA_BASE - /u/tomcatenv/user3
Env4 - $CATALINA_BASE - /u/tomcatenv/user4
Env5 - $CATALINA_BASE - /u/tomcatenv/user5

All catalina base environments have the following directories

common
conf
webapps
logs
server
webapps
work

And they all point to the same $CATALINA_HOME in /u/tomcat

Now every now and then the system runs out of resources and we would want to find out which environment is the culprit. We would also like to monitor the connection pools on each of the environments.

My question i guess is, is it possible to install the tomcat manager and admin application in such a way that it can monitor all the catalina base environment. I have been reading around and so far i think the tomcat manager application can only be installed per $CATALINA_BASE.

I have also looked at probe which i believe it also can only per $CATALINA_BASE. Is there another solution? If not the manager/admin apps, is there any opensource tool that can monitor multiple $CATALINA_BASES?

Answer 1

No, not quite. What you actually have here is N instances of Tomcat running separate from each other and at the same time.

It's as if you set up five different machines each with their own Tomcat instance - you'd have five separate Tomcat servers. Except in your case, you've but these five distinct Tomcat servers on the same physical machine.

The Tomcat manager webapp is meant to manage one Tomcat instance. There may be management tools out there to manage multiple instances; but I don't think the built-in Manager suffices for this.

Answer 2

I've been searching around and it looks like Tcat server monitoring allows you a single console to look at all your instances.

See the section "Perform in-depth diagnostics on Tomcat instances" listed here for Monitoring

It's a free download for developers - but take a look at the pricing and other fine print. I've not tried this myself.

On a related note but not a direct answer, I've run jconsole to do a remote JMX monitoring of multiple Tomcat instances from a single command line application. This shows me memory usage and lots of other stuff, but not connection pool usage which is what you want.