The following are Flash demos that you may find helpful in getting started with RHQ. Make sure to also have a peek at the Videos section on the developers pages.
If you wish to download the Flash files for offline viewing, or if you want to view the tutorial at a size that fits your screen, right-click the "download" links below and select "Save Link As".
There are older demos for Jopr 2.0 and 2.1 available. They are still applicable to Jopr 2.2 and are useful to watch also.
A demo that shows how you can easily install a RHQ Server and Agent and how you import your initial set of managed resources into inventory.
These demos show you how you use mixed and compatible groups in conjunction with users/roles to authorize users for access to subsets of resources in your RHQ inventory.
The first demo is a longer version of the second "quick" demo.
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Jopr 2.2 provides new group/cluster view - very powerful capabilities that let you view data aggregated across similar resources.
This demo shows how the content subsystem within RHQ is capable of cataloging and distributing content to many different types of resources. The demo shows how RHQ can install a JBossAS cumulative patch as well as supporting yum-updates of Linux updates.
This demo shows how Affinity Groups help you better configure your High Availablity Server cloud.
If you have a custom application or generic process running in your environment that you want to monitor, but there does not yet exist a specific RHQ plugin to manage that application or process, you are not out of luck! There are a few out-of-box options you can use to perform general process monitoring. These demos show you how you can tell RHQ to manage and monitor any process running in your environment.
The first demo shows you how you can use the Script plugin to manage an application that has a command line interface. You can use this to determine if your application is up or down and you can use it to invoke the application's command line executable or script with any command line options you want in order to manage the application.
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The second demo shows you the process monitoring feature that allows you to monitor any process running on your machines, whether or not they have a command line interface. This can be used to inform you if your managed process is up or down, and it can collect some metrics on the managed process, such as CPU utilization, memory consumption, and file descriptor usage.
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RHQ is introducing a major new feature - server plugins. Just as you can plug functionality into the RHQ agent using agent plugins, you now have similar capabilities in the server. Using server plugins, you have access to the full breadth and depth of functionality that the core RHQ Server code has, without having to modify core code. With a minimum of a single Java POJO bundled with an XML descriptor, you can extend RHQ server functionality in areas you couldn't with the agent plugins. See the demos for an illustration of the potential that server plugins open up.
Simple Reports demo shows the sample simple reports server plugin in action. Watch how a server plugin can be used to generate reports that contain inventory data as well as live data from agents.
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RHQ is called a management "platform" because it is intended to be extended via agent plugins to manage any manageable resource. As an exercise to demonstrate this concept, a "Byteman plugin" has been developed. Byteman is a powerful debugging and tracing tool that can be used to inject test code into any running Java virtual machine. It is very easy to use, yet very powerful. By providing an RHQ plugin for Byteman, it is easy to see how RHQ was extended to provide a management GUI for Byteman, thus allowing you to do things such as enabling and disabling debugging code within your application, without having to recompile or even restart your application.
RHQ can now provision what it calls "bundles". Bundles are nothing more than files of content that you wish to install on remote machines. RHQ will manage your versioned bundles, allowing you to install and upgrade them, while providing audit history of what content was and is installed on your remote platforms.
Essentially, this bundle provisioning feature allows you to push out software products (such as application servers, databases, web servers, custom applications, etc) and install or upgrade them.
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This demo uses a combination of bundles and server plugins to install, configure, and run a Cassandra cluster on a single machine for development and testing.
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RHQ has the ability to invoke operations on any resource when it triggers alerts. Combine this with the Script plugin and you have a very powerful mechanism to integrate your own processes and rules to help correct or workaround abnormal conditions that occur in your managed environment.
This demo shows how you can execute any script on a remote machine when an alert is triggered by RHQ. For example, if you set up an alert that detects when your app server is using an abnormally large number of threads (a possible indication of heavy load), you can have RHQ execute a custom script on your app server machine to help alleviate problems that might occur due to that condition (such a script could be one that reconfigures a load balancer to help redirect load away from your app server).