Tuesday, April 21, 2009

Jopr and Embedded Jopr - What Are They?

Jopr and Embedded Jopr. Aside from each having Jopr in the name, how are they related? How are they different? Why do these two projects exist? I'll try to explain that here.

Jopr is a management platform. It allows you to manage an entire network of systems and products hosted in your IT environment.

Embedded Jopr is a management console that is embedded in a JBoss Application Server to allow you to manage that particular JBossAS instance.

Jopr and Embedded Jopr use what are known as "plugins" to do the real management work - each plugin is specific to a particular product or software component that needs to be managed. For example, today there exists plugins to manage JBossAS, Tomcat, Hibernate, and PostgreSQL, among other things. These "plugins" live in what is called the "Jopr Plugin Container". This plugin container is responsible for controlling the lifecycle of the plugins.

Jopr and Embedded Jopr are related in one important aspect - they share alot of the same code! The beauty of the architectural design of Jopr is such that you can take the Jopr Plugin Container and its plugins and embed them in any Java virtual machine - including a virtual machine that is running a JBossAS instance.

Embedded Jopr uses the Jopr Plugin Container and embeds it directly inside a web application (aka .war) that is deployed inside JBossAS, allowing you to directly manage that JBossAS instance. In other words, Embedded Jopr is managing the very JBossAS instance in which it lives.

Jopr, on the other hand, has a standalone Jopr Agent and it is this Jopr Agent that embeds the Jopr Plugin Container. The Jopr Agent is able to do a few things Embedded Jopr cannot do but the main difference is that the Jopr Agent can communicate with a Jopr Server cloud, allowing it to participate in a full-fledged management enterprise environment.

The next couple diagrams illustrate these two different models. First is Embedded Jopr. Notice that everything here is directly hosted within a managed JBossAS instance. Inside JBossAS are, of course, its own internal services, one of which is Embedded Jopr. Embedded Jopr is used to manage this JBossAS instance. It is analogous to the jmx-console, only with more powerful features. You will notice that inside Embedded Jopr is code for the actual user interface as well as the Jopr Plugin Container. This Jopr Plugin Container code is identical to the plugin container used by Jopr - not a single line of code is different in this Jopr Plugin Container as compared to the plugin container deployed within the Jopr Agent (which we'll talk about later on). The plugins are, also, identical. In fact, this is designed in such a way that allows others to write custom Jopr plugins and deploy them, not only in Jopr Agents, but in Embedded Jopr as well. The hope is that Embedded Jopr will be able to support the management of other services deployed in its JBossAS instance, thus allowing you to enhance and extend Embedded Jopr with off-the-shelf plugins or your own custom plugins to manage your own custom services. There are many opportunities to extend Embedded Jopr in this way - think of all the different components that you could deploy in JBossAS that you'd want to manage (Portal, Seam, jBPM, Drools, JBossTS, JBossCache, etc.); if you had plugins for them, you'd just deploy them inside Embedded Jopr's plugin container and you could immediately begin to manage them. You could then take those plugins and later deploy them inside a Jopr Agent (without the need to touch or even rebuild your plugins) and have them be used within a full-fledged Jopr management enterprise. This concept has been proven to work by the mere fact that Embedded Jopr exists. Embedded Jopr already ships with some plugins common with the Jopr Agent (the JMX plugin is one of them).

Now let's look closer at the deployment model of Jopr. First, notice that the Jopr Agent, at its core, is the same Jopr Plugin Container that we saw in Embedded Jopr. It's the same code. Reusability is a wonderful thing. And remember, not only is the Jopr Plugin Container reused, but the plugins themselves are 100% reuseable, too. But now notice the difference. The Jopr Agent is standalone - its separate from any managed JBossAS instance. In fact, the Jopr Agent can manage multiple JBossAS instances! Not only that, but it can also manage any number of products or components - PostgreSQL databases, remoted Java Virtual Machines, operating system services, and anything else you want (even your own custom products or components), as long as you have a plugin that is capable of managing them (I won't get into plugin development topics, see the Plugin Development wiki to learn how you can write your own plugins).

The next major difference you see here is the Jopr Agent can communicate with the Jopr Server cloud (which consists of 1 or more Jopr Servers with persistence storage backing those servers). The Jopr Server provides additional capabilities not available to Embedded Jopr. These include the ability to: persist historical metric data from your managed resources, provide an alerting mechanism to notify IT administrators when something goes wrong within your managed environment, provide a persisted audit trail for security tracking, provide persistence storage of events occuring within your managed resources, and many other things.

Hopefully, I've answered the basic question, "What is Embedded Jopr and how is it different from Jopr?".

What I've also hoped to convey was a bit of an architectural overview of the Jopr Plugin Container and its management plugins and how their reusability is exploited to make development and use of both Embedded Jopr and Jopr much more easier.


  1. Just an FYI - since the time that this blog entry was posted, the name "Jopr" has been deprecated. The Jopr project was rolled upstream into the core RHQ project. Now, whenever you see "Jopr", just think "RHQ" instead. It was basically just a name change.