Running the RHQ-agent on a Raspberry PI [updated]

I finally got a Raspberry Pi too. After the hurdles of initial installation, got it hooked up to my LAN and of course I had to install an RHQ agent on it.

And it turned out that this was dead simple, as the Pi already has Java 1.7 installed (in the Raspbian Wheezy distro that I am using). Thus it was only a matter of laying down the rhq-agent, and starting it the usual way.

Now there was one caveat: the agent did not find any file systems or network interfaces etc. This is due to the fact that there is no native library for Sigar on arm v6 cpus supplied with the agent.

I cloned Sigar from its git repository, changed into the 1.6 branch and built that library myself.

Now after dropping libsigar-arm-linux.so into the agent's lib/ directory, the native library is available and on agent restart all the native stuff could be found.

(Platform details in RHQ)

If you don't want to compile that library yourself, you can take my version from https://sourceforge.net/projects/rhq/files/rhq/misc/.

I will try to get that library into the upcoming RHQ 4.10 release, but can't promise anything.

Update

If you run the agent from current master (or upcoming RHQ 4.10), you can configure a list of plugins to be enabled, so that the agent only uses these plugins (and thus uses less memory and starts faster).
This property can be found in the file conf/agent-configuration.xml:

  <entry key="rhq.agent.plugins.enabled" value="Platforms,JMX,RHQAgent"/>

The entries are a comma separated list of plugin (short) names. To determine those, you can run
plugins info at the agent command prompt:

> plugins info
Details of the plugins that are currently installed:

rhq-agent-plugin-4.10.0-SNAPSHOT.jar
        Plugin Name:  RHQAgent
        Display Name: RHQ Agent
        Last Updated: 14. Februar 2014 11:03:35 MEZ
        File Size:    51.558 bytes
        MD5 Hashcode: f7eb7577af667ee4883437230e4b2d8c
[...]

Summary of installed plugins:
[RHQAgent, Platforms, JMX]

The short names are the ones encoded as "Plugin Name" and which are also shown on the summary line. There has actually been a property to disable unwanted plugins for a longer time, but just enabling the ones needed is probably easier.

The other thing you should do it to remove the -Xms setting in the rhq-agent.sh script- the default of a 64MB minimum heap is just too large here.

With those 3 plugins above and the removed Xms setting, my agent has a committed heap of ~14MB and a used heap of ~11MB. A dump is/was 4MB in size.

P.S.: “Raspberry Pi" is a trademark of the Raspberry Pi Foundation