Monitoring with Hyperic HQ

Hyperic is a company that was aquired by SpringSource which in its turn was aquired by vmware. Probably during the chain of acquisitions a lot of links on Hyperic official web site were broken and now a half of the web pages couldn't be found.

Hyperic documentation often references to Hyperic's monitoring product with terms "Hyperic HQ" and "vFabric" and you must go quite deep into Hyperic's company marketing details in order to understand the differences between one and another.

Architecture of Hyperic HQ is plugin-based and there are a lot of ready-to-go integrations with most of the widely used application servers and other enterprise components. Custom plugin creation is possible. In Hyperic’s documentation there are a lot of comparisons to Nagios features and that is positioning Nagios as the main Hyperic's competitor. On the other hand Hyperic HQ has its own plugin for Nagios.

From deployment perspective Hyperic HQ has a server side component that could be installed locally or remotely and the agents that must be installed on machines with applications to monitor. Server side is built upon JBoss server and uses an embedded database with possibility to plug an external database. Agent is simply a java process built with Java Service Wrapper (JSW) technology to allow an operation system to watchdog and automatically relaunch agent after downtime like Windows services or Unix deamons do. Agent monitors applications and communicates with server side unidirectionally or bidirectionally. In case of unidirectional communication server doesn't initiate any communication with its agents and only waits for incoming connections so you should only ensure that Hyperic HQ server could be reached via HTTPS from remote machines with agents installed. However if you want to enable bidirectional communication you must also ensure that you are allowed to open remote port and you can access agent's remote port from Hyperic HQ server machine.

In my case Hyperic HQ usage attempt has failed very quickly. First I don't have permissions to install Hyperic HQ server to my customer's servers. So I had to install server side to my local machine. Second I can't establish HTTPS connection from agents that are running on customer's well-secured remote machines to my local machine. So I've played a bit with agent installed on my local machine and I must admit that unfortunately the agent couldn't auto-discover any java application servers running locally but only a Tomcat server bundled with Windows service.

As a summary Hyperic HQ looks like a mature product and could be considered as a monitoring tool to be used by admins and developers. If you decide to give it a try ensure that you can install a server pretty close to your monitored machines and you can manage opening ports on firewall and HTTPS traffic. For unknown reason Hyperic HQ version 5.0 is not available for download although it's availability was reported in 2012. Hyperic HQ forum is very active, however their public VCS shows very few commits. There are both enterprise and open source versions available however I was waiting for 1 day to complete registration process just to have an opportunity to try the software. The price for Hyperic HQ Enterprise edition is a mystery. Hyperic HQ UI is surely not a masterpiece but it is quite concise and usable web application.