Introducing the No-op plugin for RHQ

“A no-op plugin, does that make sense?” you will ask - and indeed it makes sense when you look at recent developments inside RHQ with the REST-api and also the support for jar-less plugins.

The no-op plugin is meant to support jar-less plugins that are written to define ResourceTypes on the server along with their metrics in order to be usable via the REST api, but where no resources are supposed to be found via the classic java-agent.

A concrete use case is the work our GSoC student Krzysztof is doing by bridging monitoring data from CIMmons deployed e.g. in RHEL servers to RHQ resources. Here we have the (possible) need to define resource types that will only be fed via the REST api.

How do I use this?

Basically you write a plugin descriptor (either in the classical way which you then put into a plugin jar) or with the name of *-rhq-plugin.xml and then deploy that into the server. The contents of this descriptor then refer to the No-op plugin - first in the <plugin> elements’s package declaration:

<plugin name="bar-test"
    version="4.5.1"
    displayName="Jar less plugin test"
    description="Just testing"
    package="org.rhq.plugins.noop”
    xmlns="urn:xmlns:rhq-plugin"
    xmlns:c="urn:xmlns:rhq-configuration">

The next part is then to declare a dependency on the No-op plugin to be able to use the classes:

   <depends plugin="No-op" useClasses="true"/>

And finally to use the NoopComponent for the discovery and component classes of <server>s and <service>s:

    <server name="test"
        discovery="NoopComponent"
        class="NoopComponent"
        >
     …
    </server>
</plugin>

A plugin defined like this then defines metrics etc. just like every other plugin. This is the plugin info:

And the metric definition templates:

JAR-less plugins for RHQ

Mazz has written a few times about the Custom-JMX plugin (funnily enough I did not find a newer post to link to), which is basically a plugin descriptor, that re-uses the classes from the base JMX plugin.

While this is very powerful, it has the small usability drawback of requiring to wrap the descriptor into a jar file to be recognized by the server (and the agents).

I have now implemented BZ 741682 which allows to deploy plugin descriptors only. For this to work

• the file needs to be called *-rhq-plugin.xml (e.g. foo-rhq-plugin.xml)
• the classes of the plugin need to already be present on the agent

The latter can be achieved by putting a depends directive into the descriptor:

<depends plugin="JMX" useClassed="true"/>

In the following example you see the bar-rhq-plugin.xml file picked up from the $SERVER/plugins directory
(the "drop-box") and placed into the plugins directory inside the app:

09:18:55,160 INFO  [PluginDeploymentScanner] Found plugin descriptor at 
    [/im/dev-container/plugins/bar-rhq-plugin.xml] and placed it at 
    [/im/dev-container/jbossas/server/default/deploy/rhq.ear/rhq-downloads/rhq-plugins/bar-rhq-plugin.xml]

Next is the transformation of this plugin descriptor into a jar file - if this is successful, the now obsolete plugin descriptor is removed.

09:18:55,403 INFO  [AgentPluginScanner] Found a plugin-descriptor at 
    [/im/dev-container/jbossas/server/default/deploy/rhq.ear/rhq-downloads/rhq-plugins/bar-rhq-plugin.xml],
    creating a jar from it to be deployed at the next scan
09:18:55,411 INFO  [AgentPluginScanner] Deleted the now obsolete plugin descriptor: true

At the next scan of the deployment scanner, the scanner will pick up this generated jar and deploy it like any other plugin:

09:19:26,470 INFO  [ProductPluginDeployer] Discovered agent plugin [bar-test]
09:19:26,474 INFO  [ProductPluginDeployer] Deploying [1] new or updated agent plugins: [bar-test]
09:19:26,656 INFO  [ResourceMetadataManagerBean] Persisting new ResourceType [bar-test:test(id=0)]...
09:19:29,344 INFO  [ProductPluginDeployer] Plugin metadata updates are complete for [1] plugins: [bar-test]

The last step would then be to run plugins update on the agent to get this new plugin from the server and to deploy it into the agent.