Debugging And Monitoring Atmosphere using Atmosphere Tower Control

Explore your Atmosphere .... with few clicks

Atmosphere Tower Control is designed with ease of use and flexibility in mind and delivers unprecedented power to Atmosphere’s Developers. Atmosphere Tower Control is a complete ecosystem for developers, offering a complete end to end solution for monitoring an debugging an Atmosphere application.

Tower Control offers the ability to completely configure Atmosphere, collect statistics, reload Atmosphere applications and hot swap an Atmosphere applications remotely.

Installing Tower Control

Installing Tower Control is simple. All you need to do is to add the artefact:

<dependency>
<groupId>io.async</groupId>
<artifactId>atmosphere-tower-control</artifactId>
<version>1.0.0</version>
</dependency>

Atmosphere will auto-detect the jar and will install Tower Control automatically. Once installed, you should see in your log:

11:56:17.411 INFO [main] o.a.c.AnnotationHandler [AnnotationHandler.java:63] Found Annotation in class io.async.control.TowerControlInterceptor being scanned: interface org.atmosphere.config.service.AtmosphereInterceptorService
11:56:17.537 INFO [main] i.a.c.TowerControlInterceptor [TowerControlInterceptor.java:58]

	 Atmosphere Tower Control


11:56:17.538 INFO [main] o.a.c.AnnotationHandler [AnnotationHandler.java:63] Found Annotation in class io.async.control.TowerConttrolListener being scanned: interface org.atmosphere.config.service.BroadcasterListenerService

Starting Tower Control

To start Tower Control, all you need to have is a tool supporting JMX. For example, both Java Mission Control(JMC) and jVisualVM supports JMX. Let’s assume we will use JMC. To start JMC, just do:

 % jmc

Next, select under the JVM Browser Tab, select the Java process, which started your Atmosphere Application. On the right side, select the MBean Tab. You should see

To make things simpler, type io.async in the Filter field, so we just see Tower Control Beans

All the Atmosphere’s MBeans are grouped by type:

  • io.async.control: Contains information about installed AsyncSupport and AtmosphereFramework classes.
  • io.async.control.broadcaster: The current set of created Broadcaster with their associated state.
  • io.async.control.cache: The current set of created BroadcasterCache with their associated state.
  • io.async.control.factory: The BroadcasterFactory, AtmosphereResourceFactory and WebSocketProcessorFactory with their associated state.
  • io.async.control.interceptors: The current set of installed AtmosphereInterceptor with their associated state.
  • io.async.control.resource: The current set of connected clients, represented by their AtmosphereResource.
  • io.async.statistics: Live statistic like number of connections, messages, transport used as well as Browser’s used.
  • io.async.control.websocket: Contains information about installed WebSocketProcessor

Let’s explore them one by one and see what kind of information is available from those beans.

io.async.control.AsyncSupport

Attributes

Contains information about the server used and if websocket is supported or not.

Operations

No operation available

io.async.control.AtmosphereFramework

Attributes

Contains information about how Atmosphere has been started and configured. Everything configured by default or via web/application.xml is getting reflected.

Operations

You can reconfigure the AtmosphereFramework via the MBean’s operations. For example, you can add BroadcasterListener, init-params etc. and then click on reload to reconfigure the AtmosphereFramework.

io.async.control.broadcaster

Attributes

Contains information about the current state of a Broadcaster. For example, the AtmosphereResource, the number of them, the installed BroadcasterListener, etc.

Operations

Several operations are available, like adding, on the fly, AtmosphereResource, broadcasting messages, resuming AtmosphereResources etc.

io.async.control.cache

Attributes

Contains information about the current state of the BroadcasterCache like active AtmosphereResource, installed listeners etc.

Operations

Message can be added, excluded or deleted from the cache

io.async.control.config

Attributes

Contains information about the BroadcasterConfig likes Thread, Thread Pool, etc.

Operations

You can destroy or remove BroadcastFilter

io.async.control.factory

Attributes

Contains information about the number of AtmosphereResource, Broadcaster and WebSocketProcessor

Operations

You add find AtmosphereResource based on their UUID

io.async.control.interceptors

Attributes

Contains information about the installed AtmosphereInterceptors

Operations

For example, you can configure on the fly the SuspendTrackerInterceptor.

io.async.control.resource

Attributes

The list of current connected users, or AtmosphereResource.

Operations

You can close and or resume an existing AtmosphereResource

io.async.control.statistics

Attributes

Collect statistics about the current number of connections, disconnected count, total received messages etc.

Operations

Enable/Disable statistics collection.

io.async.control.websocket

Attributes

Information about how websockets are installed and configured.

Operations

None

Debugging and Monitoring!

As you can see, Tower Control can not only be used as a debug tool, but as a powerful monitoring tool for application deployed in production.