Skip to main content
Version: Self Hosted Lite

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.