Monitoring JBoss AS

Supported versions

Instana supports the following versions of JBoss AS, Wildfly, and Jboss EAP:

• JBoss AS 7.0.x - 7.1.1
• Wildfly 10.0.x - 28.0.1
• JBoss EAP 7.0.x or later

The JBoss AS4 versions supported on Instana are listed in the following table:

Supported client-side tracing

For this technology, Instana supports tracing. For more information, see Instrumented frameworks and libraries.

Required Configuration in Wildfly

Currently, Instana cannot automatically monitor Wildfly or JBoss unless statistics are enabled in Jboss or Wildfly.

For Wildfly or JBoss to collect metrics, you need to enable statistics for undertow and datasources by setting statistics-enabled="true" as follows:

<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">

If you want to enable Wildfly or JBoss statistics in the domain mode, check the profile that your server belongs to, and make sure to enable statistics for that profile in the subsystem undertow section.

      If you are doing this by using the Jboss Management console, go to the **Runtime** section, choose your `Server Group`, and check which `Profile` is associated to your `Server Group`. Then, go to the **Configuration** section, and choose the profile that is associated to your `Server Group` in the **Profile** section. In the **Subsystem** section, go to **Web/HTTP - Undertow**, and change `Statistics enabled:false` to `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*

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)
• Workers (available only for JBoss EAP 7.0.9 or later)

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.