Chapter 1. How JBoss ON Manages JBoss Resources

JBoss AS/EAP is an application server, so its core goal is delivering web content. In order to manage JBoss applications effectively, JBoss ON manages both the application server itself and the content that it delivers.

At the server level, JBoss ON treats JBoss servers and services as resources, just like other types of managed resources. Each major JBoss server type — like EAP, SOA-P, Data Services, or Business Rules Management — is implemented through an agent resource plug-in; these plug-ins are available in separate, independently-installed plug-in packs. These plug-ins define a variety of related services and projects that support the main server type. For example, the EAP plug-in pack includes agent plug-ins for EAP, Hibernate, Cache Service, JMS, and JMX.

JBoss ON provides support for application servers and services by managing and monitoring:

In JBoss ON, there is a very close relationship between JBoss resources and JBoss content. The web content — like EARs, WARs, and web contexts — is treated as a hybrid kind of resource. They have a defined parent-child hierarchy and have management tasks like starting and stopping instances, metrics and alerting, and configurtion properties as do other types of resources.

But content-backed resources are simultaneously treated as software packages, with update histories, content repositories, and the ability to revert to previous versions.

Managing JBoss content resources, then, focuses on the relationship of the content to the application server:

The key for management (of resources and content) is that everything is unified into a central location, across JBoss applications, across domains, and across machines.