Chapter 1. About JBoss Operations Network
The primary use for JBoss ON is to give administrators a single point of access to view their systems. Functionally, that means that JBoss ON provides a means to develop and monitor a system's inventory. Every managed resource – from platforms to applications to services – is contained and organized in the inventory, no matter how complex the IT environment is.
JBoss ON centralizes all of its operations in an installed server. The JBoss ON server communicates with locally installed JBoss ON agents, which interact directly with the platform and services to carry out local tasks such as monitoring. The types of resources that can be managed by JBoss ON and the operations that can be carried out are determined by the server and agent plug-ins which are loaded in JBoss ON.
The relationships between servers, agents, plug-ins, and resources are what define JBoss ON.
1.1. About JBoss ON Agents
JBoss ON agents are deployed on every machine that JBoss ON manages. The agent is an intermediary between the resource itself and the central JBoss ON server.
The agents receive updates like configuration changes, updated packages, new settings for alerts, and operations from the JBoss ON server and then it carries out those tasks on the resource. The agent also collects information from the resource which it forwards to the server. This allows the server to process alerts, metrics, and availability information for the resource.
Because the agent is independent of the server, it can continue with its monitoring tasks and gather information about the resource even if the server is down or the resource loses network connectivity.
Each resource is arranged in a hierarchy, showing relationships between platforms, servers, and services. Only one agent is required per machine; once the platform is managed as a resource, all or a subset of installed applications or services can be added as resources, all using the same local agent.
