Introducing the Grails Monitor Plugin

Grails is a fantastic web framework based on Groovy, which brings the convention-over-configuration paradigm pioneered by Ruby on Rails to the Java world. There is currently a lot of buzz around Grails and so far I had a lot of fun working with the framework.

One aspect of Grails is easy extensibility using plugins. There are already some plugins, which cover a lot of functionality. I have been working on a plugin of my own, a generic monitoring plugin, which will be released shortly under a Apache License.

The monitoring plugin provides pre-defined monitors for many aspects of a web application. Additionally it is really easy to define your own monitors to track usage of application-specific metrics.

The plugin is based around rr4j, which is a Java port of the well-known RRDTool and uses its data storage and graphing engine. It requires the Quartz Plugin (with my patches for GRAILSPLUGINS-190 and GRAILSPLUGINS-213) and Java 1.5 or greater.

Read full article here