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Version: Cloud

Monitor Tomcat Server on Linux

Overview​

Tomcat server monitoring collect multiple types of metrics like server stats, context stats, jvm stats using Jolokia

Pre-requisites​

JVM and JCMD​

Tomcat Plugin is based on Jolokia agent which requires JMX monitoring to be enabled locally.

  • JCMD command must be installed in the machine
  • The JVM must have HotSpot enabled and be a JVM 1.6 or larger.

Access Log Format​

Tomcat server access log format needs to be modified to capture all metrics from the access logs, which includes following steps

  • Edit the file $TOMCAT_HOME/conf/server.xml

  • Set log format in “org.apache.catalina.valves.AccessLogValve” class, pattern value to pre-defined “combined” log format or

%h %l %u %t "%r" %s %b %D "%{Referer}i" "%{User-Agent}i"

After changing log pattern to combined or the above mentioned pattern, sample log would look like:

49.206.1.85 - - [30/Jun/2020:13:12:32 +0000] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 200 11286 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/83.0.4103.106 Safari/537.36"
note

Supported Tomcat version 8 or larger.

Configuration​

sfAgent section provides steps to install and automatically generate plugin configurations. User can also manually add the configuration shown below to config.yaml under /opt/sfagent/ directory 

key: <profile key> 
generate_name: true 
tags: 
  Name: <unique instance name or will be generated from IP> 
  appName: <add application name> 
  projectName: <add project name> 
metrics: 
  plugins: 
    - name: tomcat 
      enabled: true 
      interval: 300 
      config: 
        username: xxxx 
        password: xxxx
        documentsTypes:
          - tomcatStats
          - requestProcessorStats
          - jvmStats
          - contextStats
logging: 
  plugins: 
    - name: tomcat-access 
      enabled: true 
      config: 
        geo_info: true  
        log_path: /opt/apache-tomcat*/logs/localhost_access_*.txt 
        ua_parser: false
        url_normalizer: false

Tomcat Access Log Options​

  1. Geo-IP: Useful to find geographical location of the client using the IP address. To enable, set the option "geo_info" to true in the above configuration.
  2. User-Agent Analysis: To get the host machine details like browser, Operating system and device by analysis the user-agent. To enable, set the option "ua_parser" to true in the above configuration. If enabled, by default it runs on port 8586.
  3. URL Normalizer (not supported in container deployment): Normalize incoming URL paths. To enable, set the option "url_normalizer" to true in the above configuration. If enabled, by default it runs on port 8587.

Normalization specific configuration is available in /opt/sfagent/normalization/config.yaml which resonate the following,

interval: 300
dynamic_rule_generation:
  enabled: true
  rules_length_limit: 1000 
  log_volume: 100000
rules: []

Config Field Description​

interval: Normalization algorithm runtime interval.

enabled: Rely on normalization feature for rule generation.

rules_length_limit: Limit over size of generated rules. set the value to -1 for specifying no limit.

log_volume: Limit over number of logs processed. set the value to -1 for specifying no limit.

rules: Rules Generated.

Recommended approach is to run sfagent with dynamic_rule_generation enabled over a period of time. Observe whether rules generated reflect all the web app requests intended to be normalized and if its a true reflection, set enabled flag to false , indicating no further rules will be generated

Default ports used by user-agent analysis and URL Normalizer can be changed respectively with the inclusion of following in config.yaml

agent:
  uaparserport: port_number
  url_normalizer: port_number
note

  1. Latitude and Longitude are often near the center of population. These values are not precise and should not be used to identify a particular address or household.

  2. User-agent parsing requires high computation power. Recommended to enable only if needed and system have enough CPU resource available.

Enhance URL Normalization​

Refer the following document for comprehensive instructions and guidelines for setting up and developing rules to enhance URL normalization.

Rule Development Guide and Setup Instructions

View Data and Dashboard​

Tomcat server metrics plugin=tomcat consists of four document types:

  • Tomcat stats: contain metrics like tomcat sever version, uptime, thread details.
  • Request processor stats: shows request information like processing time, request count, data received and sent.
  • Context stats: contain tomcat context related metrics like hit count, lookup count etc.
  • JVM stats: contain all JVM related metrics used by tomcat server like garbage collection details, memory pools, loaded/unloaded classes etc.

Tomcat access logs come under metrics section on APM dashboard with plugin=tomcat-access and documentType=tomcatAccessLogs

  • Dashboard for this data can be instantiated by Importing dashboard template Tomcat_Server, Tomcat_Access to the application dashboard.