Zorka

Zorka is an open source, programmable, general purpose and sophisticated desktop software project designed from the ground up to be used for monitoring and profiling Java applications, as a companion to existing monitoring systems.

Features at a glance

Key features include low-overhead profiling, support for various monitoring systems and protocols, including Nagios, Zabbix, SNMP, syslog, ZICO collector and local files, powerful scripting capabilities, JMX access, transaction tracing, audit logs, error logs, slow query logs, Zorka statistics, as well as support for HTTP, SQL, LDAP, JMS and EJB open source technologies.

Integrates seamlessly with various popular application servers

Another interesting feature is that the application integrates seamlessly with various popular application servers, such as Apache Tomcat 6 and 7, JBoss 4, 5, and 6, JBoss 7, EAP 6, Jetty 6, 7, 8 and 9, IBM Websphere 7 and 8, Mule ESB, Oracle Weblogic. In addition, it comes with a couple of scripts (Jasig CAS and Spring Webflow) that are very useful for applications and application frameworks.

Under the hood and supported OSes

Zorka is a web-based application written in the Java programming language. At the moment, it works well with the Java Development Kit (JDK) 5, 6 and 7. It supports any operating system where the Java Runtime Environment (JRE) is installed, including GNU/Linux, Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X.

Build instructions

In order to build the Zorka agent from sources, you will have to first import various zorka-* packages into the Eclipse IDE, comment out the zico modules in the main pom.xml files, copy an Apache Maven plugin compiler into all pom.xml files, configure the Zorka's Maven build with the "install" goal and copy the files located on the zorka-dist/target/output/* directory to a server. Detailed installation instruction can be found on the project’s GitHub page.

What is new in this release:

• This version adds support for Wildfly 8 plus Undertow and SOAP monitoring (Axis 1.x supported at the moment, more to come).
• For JBoss 7.x and Wildfly, Zorka can now directly access JBoss configuration DMR data (without JMX), so it can see virtually all configuration and runtime parameters, including JBoss 7.0.x versions which had no support for JMX.

What is new in version 0.9.17:

• This version fixes a serious bug in the Zico collector and adds dedicated support for Spring and Quartz libraries.

What is new in version 0.9.16:

• This version contains mainly bugfixes on its way to 1.0. For new functionalities, it adds JMS monitoring scripts/templates, a generic application auditing framework (with JBoss7 currently supported, more on the way), and a generic trappers/logging framework for logging slow/error requests (e.g., HTTP, SQL, EJB, JMS) to zabbix or syslog in addition to standard files.

Requirements:

• Java 2 Standard Edition Runtime Environment