While idling in #spring on Freenode, I saw someone mention Java Melody as a good monitoring tool, so thought I’d give it a quick spin.

I significantly overestimated the amount of effort installed, and was genuinely impressed. I admittedly haven’t played with any of the more advanced bits, but basic installation is so incredibly easy and featureful that I’m more than satisfied for now.

First step, pull it into my project. I’m using Apache Maven, so this was just a matter of scrolling to the Dependencies section of the documentation and copying in the requisite chunk of XML to add three dependencies and a repository to source them from.

Second, hook it up. In my case, this just involved scrolling back up to the web.xml section, and copying in another small chunk of XML to add a filter, filter-mapping and listener.

A whole 5 minutes later, and it was just like the screenshots! Charts of various attributes, request statistics, system information, thread monitoring and more. The app I’m currently working on is pretty light-weight, so I don’t have any database connections, batch jobs or other advanced fun to monitor, but if it’s anything like my experiences so far, it’ll be a breeze to sort.

At some point I’ll make time to try out the beta “Deployment on Tomcat without modification of monitored webapps” so I can get monitoring across a range of apps without them needing to care or know. For now, I’m definitely genuinely very impressed!