RHQ 4.8 released

RHQ 4.8 has been released with another batch of new features and bug fixes.
Major changes since RHQ 4.7 are

• New storage backend for metrics based on Cassandra:
  
  Numerical metric data is now stored in a Cassandra cluster to improve scalability for larger deployments with many metrics.
  
  
  
  The intention is to move more mass data into Cassandra into the future (events, calltime data etc). We just had to start somewhere. If you are upgrading from an earlier version of RHQ, a utility to migrate metrics gathered is provided.
  
• More improvements to the new charts
  
  
  
  The selection of the time period has been changed:
  
  • There is now a button bar at the top to quickly select the timeframe to display
  • If you hover with the mouse between two "bars" you will see a little crosshair, that starts the
    selection mode - drag it over a series of bars to zoom in. Mike Thompson has created a YouTube video that explains this.
    
• New installation process:
  
  With the above change of the backend storage, we have changed the installation process again to reduce the complexity to install RHQ. The new process basically goes:
  
  • unzip rhq-server-4.8.0.zip
  • cd rhq-server-4.8.0
  • edit bin/rhq-server.properties
  • bin/rhqctl install (--storage-data-root-dir=<some directory>
  
  For upgrades the process is very similar: you run unzip the new binaries and then run bin/rhqctl upgrade --from-server-dir=<old server>
  Please consult the installation and upgrade guides before starting.
  
• REST-api is now (mostly) stable and supports paging on (some) resources. The documentation is also up on SourceForge and the rhq-samples project has a special section on examples for the REST-api.

As always there have been many more smaller improvements and bug fixes - many thanks to everyone who has contributed via bug report, comments, discussions on #rhq and/or via code contributions.

Please check the full release notes for details. They also contain a list of commits.

RHQ is an extensible tool to monitory your infrastructure of machines and applications, alert operators on user defined conditions, configure resources and run operations on them from a central web-based UI. Other ways of communicating with RHQ include a command line interface and a REST-api.

You can download the release from source forge.

As mentioned above, the old installer is gone, so make sure to read
the wiki document describing how to use the new installer.

Maven artifacts are available from the JBoss Nexus repository and should also be available from Central.


Please give us feedback, be it in Bugzilla, Mailing lists or the forum. Or just join us on IRC at irc.freenode.net/#rhq.

And as I have been asked recently: yes we are happy to accept code contributions -- be it for the RHQ core, as well as plugins or for the samples project. Also if you e.g. have written a plugin, share a pointer to it, which we can then share on the wiki etc.