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Monitor Tomcat Server on Windows

Overview​

Tomcat monitoring involves metrics like server stats, context stats, jvm stats using Jolokia, and the server access logs.

Pre-requisites​

Enabling JMX Monitoring​

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

  • Copy the jolokia.war file from "C:/Program Files (x86)/Sfagent/" to ${TOMCAT_HOME}/webapps
  • Add jolokia as role in tomcat-users.xml (mandatory for Jolokia 1.6 or later).
  <role rolename="jolokia"/>
  <user username="jolokia" password="<password>" roles="jolokia"/>
  • Restart the Tomcat server
  • Verify the Jolokia agent installation by accessing the URL: http://address:port/jolokia/version. The result looks similar to this:
    {
    "request": {
      "type": "version"
    },
    "value": {
      "agent": "1.3.7",
      "protocol": "7.2",
      "config": {
        "maxCollectionSize": "0",
        "agentId": "10.152.24.99-29844-172f5788-servlet",
        "debug": "false",
        "agentType": "servlet",
        "serializeException": "false",
        "detectorOptions": "{}",
        "dispatcherClasses": "org.jolokia.jsr160.Jsr160RequestDispatcher",
        "maxDepth": "15",
        "discoveryEnabled": "false",
        "canonicalNaming": "true",
        "historyMaxEntries": "10",
        "includeStackTrace": "true",
        "maxObjects": "0",
        "debugMaxEntries": "100"
      },
      "info": {
        "product": "tomcat",
        "vendor": "Apache",
        "version": "8.5.23"
      }
    },
    "timestamp": 1509955465,
    "status": 200
    }

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 suffix "org.apache.catalina.valves.AccessLogValve" class, pattern value to ".log"

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

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

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"

Configuration Settings​

sfAgent section provides steps to install and automatically generate plugin configurations. User can also manually add the configuration shown below to config.yaml under "C:/Program Files (x86)/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: 
        port: 8080
        proxy: false 
        rmiport: 9000
        protocol: http
        username: xxxx
        password: xxxx
        documentsTypes:
          - tomcatStats
          - requestProcessorStats
          - jvmStats
          - contextStats 
logging: 
  plugins: 
    - name: tomcat-access 
      enabled: true 
      config: 
        log_path: "C:\\Program Files\\Apache Software Foundation\\Tomcat*\\logs\\localhost_access*.log"
        geo_info: true  
        ua_parser: false
        url_normalizer: false
note

Keep username and password same as jolokia role updated in tomcat-users.xml.

Tomcat Access Logger 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.

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

Viewing data and dashboards​

Tomcat plugin provides the following 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: Tomcat server access log details.

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