We’ve spoken in the past about Hyperic monitoring, and the roll out of this application to our managed customers. I felt that Hyperic is so slick it deserved more lip service. Some of our customers have already been given access to our monitoring system, and from the feedback we’ve received it would appear they’re quite ecstatic with it. That’s not to say that there aren’t some kinks, because there are, but I must say the microscopic kinks are almost unnoticeable. Hyperic is always improving though, and we’re doing our best to exploit the very best of this application to better serve your infrastructure here at Contegix. The servers that have Hyperic configured on them have a wide range of monitoring options such as:

• CPU Monitoring
• Load Averages
• Filesystem Usage
• Database Monitoring (MySQL, PostgreSQL, EnterpriseDB, etc)
• HTTP Checks
• Zimbra 4.X
• IMAP, POP3, SMTP (on any obscure ports imaginable!)
• Memcached
• Tomcat
• Resin
• Apache HTTP
• And so many more options you would die reading the list

We receive well over a thousand emails a day from our monitoring system, letting us know when your servers are leaving the realm of acceptable levels in a wide variety of categories. This allows us to be proactive in regards to your server’s health, and attack trouble areas before services are impacted. For instance, if we see the load on your server climbing above the typically acceptable level of 5, and staying high, we know to investigate the server before services are impacted.

Most importantly though, you don’t have to deal with the awkward situation of your website’s visitors telling you your site is down, if you’re monitored by our system. If Hyperic is monitoring your site, then that site will be checked every 5 minutes, making sure it gets a response, and checking the site for a search string that should appear on your site. If the monitor fails, we’re alerted immediately, and respond to the situation. If you have special instructions for us, we make every effort to follow them to a tee, and if you don’t have special instructions we’ll handle the situation the best way we know how to return your site to working order. For instance, on typical Java applications, we’ll thread dump the instance, restart it, and notify you of the maintenance that was performed.

I do admit though, as much as we strive to be, we’re not always perfect. At times we do require assistance from you and your team to help us be the best that we can be. While many servers at Contegix follow the Contegix way of doing things, not everything follows exactly what we’re accustomed to. That’s okay though, we don’t mind it, after all these are your servers! However, for us to fully monitor your services to our fullest potential, we do encourage you to let us know what needs to be monitored. Even if you don’t have a special setup, we don’t mind you checking with us on what’s being monitored. In fact, I encourage that too! We want you to feel comfortable here, and if double checking with us that everything you need monitored, is monitored, then drop us a line. There’s absolutely no harm in that, as it ensures that nothing is missed, and that we’re serving you to the best of our ability. Please keep in mind though that running the Hyperic agent on your server will require a small amount of memory, as this is a Java application which means it requires some resources. If you already have a heavily taxed server, throwing the Hyperic agent into the mix may not be a good idea, but I believe this to be a very rare situation.

Finally, maybe the coolest part of Hyperic is that we can give you access to the system as well! This gives you the ability to see the metrics that are produced by the monitoring system for your servers. The access that is granted to you is read only access, so you can’t create sensors, but you can always ask for new ones (again, it’s encouraged!). This ability has already helped a few of our customers, by giving them insight into how their services were behaving, allowing them to clean up trouble spots in their applications and infrastructure. All you need to gain access is drop a line to support@contegix.com, and we’ll be happy to get it setup for you. Let’s take a look at Atlassian for a perfect use-case scenario in which Hyperic can be of great assistance.

Their documentation has a section for monitoring critical production systems. If you visit that section you’ll notice the power of Hyperic on display in the images shown. They go onto demonstrate in that article one particular scenario how the graphs enabled them to catch a critical issue with an instance of theirs, which gave them the nudge in the right direction towards correcting the problem. Furthermore, Hyperic themselves noticed Atlassian’s documentation, and hint at a potential pair of plugins for monitoring Confluence and JIRA in particular! Just remember, we’re here to help you improve in anyway possible. Drop us a line, and get more from your hosting environment with us with Hyperic access!

At Contegix, the NOC engineers spend a lot of time working with Atlassian’s products. We are in a constant cycle of installing, maintaining, and upgrading Confuence, JIRA, etc. for customers. We install their plugins, help work out the kinks, and make sure the applications stay running as close to 100% of the time as possible. Oddly, up until lately we’ve mainly only used one application of Atlassian’s internally - Confluence. Of course, we use Crowd here and there as well, but it’s transparent and I never need to worry that it even exists in our infrastructure. JIRA is used for projects with our development consultants and special projects. Everything we document ends up in Confluence, and that allows us to be more productive as we have this incredible encyclopedia of knowledge constantly at our disposal. The need for JIRA by the engineers didn’t every really seem excessively relevant in the past, nor did Bamboo, Fisheye and Crucible. We’re a hosting company with system administrators, not a software development company. In our minds, it didn’t make as much sense. At least, it wasn’t overtly clear that we needed JIRA.

We have Subversion running to handle the code for most of our internal projects, emails to and fro between engineers worked as bug reports for the internal scripts we use, and email was used to announce new versions of various scripts. We’d also use Confluence in a backwards way to help manage some of our internal projects as well, which wasn’t the best solution. It worked, yes, but it wasn’t optimal. We didn’t know any better though. We’re administrators, not users! How were we supposed to know that JIRA was so slick?

Well, the advent of JIRA Studio has taught us a solid lesson, the NOC engineers needed JIRA a looooong time

ago. We often ran into problems in the past where one person would write a script or an application, but it wouldn’t gain widespread use amongst our engineers. The simple fact was that either not everyone knew about it or the script would need updates; however, it wasn’t being properly maintained. This would lead to a wide variety of editions of the script floating around - the absolute death of the script in the first place. Then, we’d revert back to everyone doing everything by hand again. It was an endless cycle that would start everytime someone wrote a mediocre or decent script. We wouldn’t give the script the proper care and love it deserved, it’d gain moderate use for a bit, and later find itself in the script graveyard. The other alternative reality was the individual engineers wrote their own scripts, but never really found the means to openly share their scripts. All of that soon changed, as our illustrious leaders bestowed upon us a great and magical gift… JIRA Studio (add your own fantasy based sound effects here, I prefer trumpets personally).

All of a sudden, we went from having no way to manage our many scripts that have been tossed around the office like dirty laundry, to having so far five projects managed in JIRA Studio. We haven’t had the instance up for more than a couple weeks, and I’m sure the number of projects we maintain internally with JIRA Studio will only increase. It’s amazing how much easier it has made life for us already though. We have subversion repositories for our individual projects, issue tracking, code reviews, great tools to analyze our repositories with, plus a solid documentation backbone. Each project is sectioned off to what feels like its own little world, yet it’s still a part of the big picture that is our developmental operations here at Contegix. We have scripts for customers, programs that make our internal life less chaotic, along with our very website just in case anyone feels the need to make improvements to it.

I think the best part of the whole experience is that we’re all finally starting to share code, discuss new ides for automation, and expanding our thinking quite a bit. Gone are the days of not enough time, not enough resources, or too much effort. We don’t have to worry about those issues now. Now I can whip up a script that has a solid base to help out our company, create a JIRA Studio project, and as a team we can nurture the script to a fruitful life.

It’s odd how just having a launching pad for our internal development projects has opened our eyes quite a bit. Before we were quite content doing a lot of our work by hand, because our development process wasn’t exactly the best. The big problem with automating what we do is we’re dealing with your (our customers) production systems. If we’re going to develop automation tasks for your systems, they absolutely must be 100%. We won’t mess around with your systems by testing half baked scripts on what for many of our customers is their livelihood. That was the past though, because now we have solid testing sandboxes setup for our automation tests, along with JIRA Studio to help us manage the process of developing our applications. We’re already starting to see the benefits as bug reports roll in, fixes roll out, and new projects are being started. I’d say this is the beginning of a new era for Contegix, as we’re now more capable of streamlining of our efforts thanks to JIRA Studio

I guess my overall point is that if you think JIRA Studio isn’t right for your company, because you’re not a development team, you may want to reconsider. I don’t believe we ever though we needed JIRA, and we don’t need it, but I sure don’t want to go back to life without it!

Did you know that right now, while you read this, there’s a sleeping giant sitting unopened in your Confluence instance? While your wiki might be a wealth of information for your enterprise business, for your project in development, or for whatever you might be using Confluence, it can also be used as a platform for an enterprise (maybe social?) networking. Now I know what you’re saying, “I don’t want my company’s Confluence instance to become a MySpace clone!” That’s understandable, and it doesn’t have to be; however, it can bring your team closer together with a variety of plugins found in your Plugin Repository. This means, your Confluence instance literally just a few clicks away from unleashing new functionality in your Confluence instance.

Just remember, happy employees that have fun together tend to work harder together. As an employee who wants to have fun while working hard, bias is in full effect:

5. IM Presence Plugin

This plugin is valid in all Confluence version from 2.0 up through 2.7.2. Plus, it’s an official Atlassian Supported Plugin. By adding this plugin, you enable a new macro which allows you to show a user’s status on a variety of instant messaging clients within Confluence. All you need to do is enable the plugin via the repository, create a dummy user for Confluence to use, and that dummy user will query the user found in a macro tag such as the following:

{im:my_username@hotmail.com|service=MSN}

Afterwards, the user, in this case ‘my_username@hotmail.com’, will receive a message from the newly created dummy user. After ‘my_username@hotmail.com’ accepts the request, you’ll be able to see that user’s status anywhere the above mentioned macro tag is placed!

4. Google Maps Plugin

Want to make sure nobody gets lost on their way to the big meeting coming up? Perhaps you’re having a company event soon? Well I can’t personally think of a better way to get everyone on the same page than the illustrious Google Maps! This plugin allows you to slap a map from Google right up on the Wiki, and even allows the Satellite image view as well.

3. Mail2News Plugin

Don’t feel like logging into Confluence? Have an email you want to turn into news? This plugin should do the trick for you, much the same way you can do with applications such as Wordpress. You setup an email account for Confluence to access, and keep it preferably hidden, install the plugin, and configure it to grab news from the email address you created. If the email address created supports wildcards, you can even direct the news via email straight to specific Confluence spaces!

2. Calendar Plugin

I would assume most people know about this plugin already, but it’s just too useful to ignore. With this you can create calendars, or subscribe to an iCalendar thus keeping everyone on the same schedule! I know you probably have other calendar applications you prefer to use, but accessing a global calendar with a few clicks is incredibly convenient.

1. Sudoku Plugin

Now, I’m completely incapable of playing Sudoku, it makes my head hurt. I’ll be happy to make sure this plugin gets installed for you, but we’re not your hint line when you get stuck alright? That aside, it is a fun a little diversion you can add to your wiki if you so please. Is it useful in any major way? Well, no, not really. At least they’ll be playing on the company site, rather than trying to get out to Yahoo Games right?

We’ll continue to keep you up to date with new plugins, macros, tricks, and other fun Confluence related information. If you have any hot tips you’d like to drop on us, feel free! We’re always in the hunt for improvements to our favorite wiki application, Confluence!