Open Source Solutions

Doug MacEachern of Hyperic and Andrew P??? of MuleSource. Hyperic is management product providing auto-inventory, deep & clean monitoring, control of servers and services, tracking of configuration changes and log events, alerting, a web-based mulit-user portal, and a scriptable CLI.

The product goals are ease of installation, maintenance, and adapting to specific needs.

Specific actions, such as vacuuming the database, can be brought into MuleHQ through its plug-in architecture.

Doug then went through a illustration depicting the Hyperic/MuleHQ inventory model, and the architectural diagram for the MuleHQ server. MuleHQ uses role-based access control. It ships with PostgreSQL, but one can use any RDBMS. Next came the architectural diagram of the MuleHQ Agent, basically a dæmon.

There are ~50 platforms supported by MuleHQ, including operating systems, web servers, virtualization servers, application servers, etc.

MuleHQ actively monitors the transport endpoints protocols.

The adaptability of MuleHQ is exemplified by the plugin development kit:

1. JMX
2. SNMP
3. Windows Performance Counters
4. SQL/JDBC
5. SIGAR
6. Scripting/Nagios
7. Java

All the plug-ins use a common API, written in Java, so that the plug-in developer need not worry about which platforms will be used in their environment. There's a plug-in development resource on http://support.hyperic.com/

Doug gave a demo, showing the AJAX web-based MuleHQ UI and features. The inventory model was shown with the platform view, listing everything on the ESB, such as various OSs and databases, and the Service, which for Mule itself, showed routers, transports and endpoints.

MuleHQ is only available with a subscription.

We're blogging from MuleCon2007 throughout today and tomorrow.