Monitoring JBoss AS

The JBoss AS sensor is automatically deployed and installed after you install the Instana agent.

Supported versions

Currently, supported versions are JBoss 4.0, or newer, and Wildfly.

Configuration

Required Configuration in Wildfly

Currently, Instana cannot automatically enable the Wildfly statistics it uses.

For Wildfly to collect metrics, Instana uses enable statistics for undertow and datasources like this:

<subsystem xmlns="urn:jboss:domain:undertow:3.0" statistics-enabled="true">

<datasource jta="true" jndi-name="java:jboss/datasources/DemoDS" pool-name="DemoDS" enabled="true" statistics-enabled="true">

JBoss Naming

Instana is naming a JBoss using the jboss node name that can be specified using: -Djboss.node.name=myjbossnodename

Sensor Configuration

At large scale, the JBoss API seems to be really inefficient. Therefore, the sensor polls performance metrics every 5 seconds, and it can be configured using the metrics-interval field.

On some legacy JBoss versions and due to bugs, calls to retrieve EJB deployments data can cause various errors. The sensor monitors EJB deployments by default, but in case these bugs happen or if it's just unnecessary, it can be disabled with the monitor-ejb-deployments flag in the configuration file. By default, Jboss regex monitoring for EJB, WEB, Data-Source and Connector is not enabled. You can configure Jboss regex for monitoring a particular deployment in the agent configuration file:<agent_install_dir>/etc/instana/configuration.yaml:

com.instana.plugin.jbossas:
  metrics-interval: 5 # seconds  
  monitor-ejb-deployments: false
  monitor-ejb-deployments-regex: '' # provide regex for ejb deployment you want to monitor i.e xyz*
  monitor-web-deployments-regex: '' # provide regex for web deployment you want to monitor i.e xyz*
  monitor-data-source-config-regex: '' # provide regex for data source configuration you want to monitor i.e xyz*
  monitor-connector-regex: '' # provide regex for connectors configuration you want to monitor i.e xyz*

Metrics collection

To view the metrics, select Infrastructure in the sidebar of the Instana User interface, click a specific monitored host, and then you can see a host dashboard with all the collected metrics and monitored processes.

Configuration data

  • Version
  • Home
  • Deployments
    • Web
    • EJB
  • Sockets

Performance metrics

  • Servlets
  • Requests, Response Times
  • Sessions
  • Connectors
  • EJB Pool
  • Datasources
  • Connection Pools (available only for JBoss 4)
  • Thread Pools (available only for JBoss 4)

Health Signatures

For each sensor, there is a curated knowledgebase of health signatures that are evaluated continuously against the incoming metrics and are used to raise issues or incidents depending on user impact.

Built-in events trigger issues or incidents based on failing health signatures on entities, and custom events trigger issues or incidents based on the thresholds of an individual metric of any given entity.

For information about built-events for the JBoss AS sensor, see the Built-in events reference.

Tracing

Instana provides tracing support for JBoss AS, and more information can be found here: Monitoring Java Virtual Machine.