RHQ 4.1.0

This is the RHQ 4.1 release. It was released on Sept 2nd 2011

Please note The autodiscovery portlet is by default disabled on the dashboard. Go to the Inventory to see the discovery queue. Webkit based browsers will not automatically forward you from the installer to the login page. Manually switch to http://localhost:7080/coregui/ RHQ 4.1 requires Java 6 – it may work on Java7, but has not yet been extensively tested (feedback is welcome). Firefox 5 is not yet supported, as the version of (Smart)GWT used in RHQ does not support it.

New Features (since RHQ 4.0.1)

GUI

• Japanese translation of the UI done by Fusayuki Minamoto
• Chinese installer messages by Jijun Liu
• Chinese translations of the UI done by Jijun Liu and Zhongqianglee
• Brasil Portuguese translations of the UI done by Rafael Torres Coelho Soares
• Dependent values: properties in the UI can now be dynamically filled by e.g. selecting other resources. This is first used in the AS7 plugin. See Needed - dependent properties and linking

Bundle Enhancements

The below two release note items were as a result of BZ 644328

Bundles And Mixed Groups

In past versions, RHQ supported deploying bundles to any group, so long as that group had only platforms as its members. So long as the member resources were of the category PLATFORM, it did not care what resource types those members were (i.e. you could have had a mixed group of Linux, Windows and Solaris platforms, for example).

However, now RHQ supports bundle deployments to non-platforms and as such as changed the way it implements this feature. Because RHQ can now support deploying to any type of resource (but only if those resource types can support bundle deployments), RHQ can no longer support deploying to mixed groups, since mixed groups do not have a single, associated resource type (they can have members of many kinds of resource types - and each kind of platform, Linux or Windows or Solaris for example, are considered different resource types).

Therefore, any previous Bundle Destinations that have been created with a mixed group can no longer be used. You must create a new set of compatible groups and assign them to their own new bundle destination. If you need to deploy to heterogeneous group of platforms, split your mixed group into separate compatible groups. For example, if you had a bundle destination that was assigned a mixed group consisting of 3 Linux platforms and 2 windows platforms, you must now create two compatible groups (one containing the 3 Linux platforms and the other containing the 2 windows platforms) and then create two new destinations for your bundle - one destination assigned the Linux compatible group and one destination assigned the Windows compatible group. Now you can deploy your bundle to the two sets of machines, albeit in two deployments, rather the one.

Remote API Changes For Bundle Subsystem

Due to the new bundle feature allowing RHQ users to deploy bundles to non-platforms, changes needed to be made to the bundle API. If you wrote remote CLI scripts to deploy bundles, the following changes may affect you.

• org.rhq.enterprise.server.bundle.BundleManagerRemote.createBundleDestination

This method adds a new "destBaseDirName" parameter. It is the name of the base directory location where the bundle will be deployed. This isn't the directory itself, it refers to the named location as defined in the agent plugin's descriptor for the resource's type.

• org.rhq.enterprise.server.bundle.BundleManagerRemote.getResourceTypeBundleConfiguration

Used mainly to support user interfaces (like the RHQ GWT GUI), this provides the bundle configuration for a given compatible group (this is going to be the compatible group's resource type's bundle configuration). Use this to find out the valid values that can be passed as the above "createBundleDestination" method's "destBaseDirName" parameter.

Drift Management

This is a new feature that enables you to monitor resources for unplanned and/or unexpected changes that are referred to as drift. You can get background on the feature including motivating use cases and design diagrams here. Here is a brief list of things are functional:

• User can schedule drift detection to occur for a resource at regularly scheduled intervals.
  • You can specify filters to further refine the set of files that are monitored.
• User can enable/disable drift detection.
• User can delete a drift configuration.
  • Note that this purges all of the change set history stored for the rules specified in the configuration.
• User can view history of changed files.
• User can view contents of files for which drift is reported.
• User can generate and view a diff of files for which drift is reported.
• Agent performs file system scans to track changes.
• There is limited support in the CLI for:
  • Querying for change sets (a change set is some what analogous to a commit in version control systems)
  • Query for files included in change sets
  • Generate and compare snapshots (A snapshot is a view over time of files under drift detection.)
  • Fetching the full contents of a file
  • Generating and viewing a diff between different versions of a file
  • Retrieving versions of a file

Here are some notable things missing and/or known not to work at this time:

• There are plans to provide a diff editor for manual remediation in a future release. Currently you can view a diff in unified format. It is a read-only view though.
• There are plans to integrate with the alert system in a future release.
• There are plans to expand the remote APIs for use from the CLI and other remote client.
• There are plans to support golden images.

RHQ Server Configuration Synchronization

A first implementation of the synchronization of configuration between different RHQ servers. By now only a rudimentary support is provided through CLI and not many subsystems in RHQ can be synchronized. You can read more about it here.

Plugins

• Brand new AS7 plugin, supports JBossAS 7.0.0 see RHQ and AS7
• SNMPTrapd plugin does now support SNMP inform messages (See BZ 723800 by Elias Ross)
• Brand new mod_cluster plugin (support for JBoss 4.2 to 6.0) - Design - mod_cluster

Known Issues

• Some error messages will be masked and instead print "InvocationTargetException: please see server log for more details", but the server log may not necessarily provide more details.
• The installer shows some non-replaced {} properties.
• Some properties are editable when viewing a configuration in read-only mode.
• Clicking Reset button on user or role edit view results in an error.
• Some parts of the UI are still in non-GWT technologies
• Metrics on the summary page of an autogroup do not work. Go to the monitor tab to view them
• Metric graphs can not be added to the Monitor->Graph page
• If you want to ignore resources, there is sometimes a red box saying "could not ignore.." - this is harmless. If you refresh the auto-discovery portlet, you will see that the resources are indeed ignored.
• Similar to above, if you elect to import resources, and it takes longer than 10 seconds to complete the import, you will get a red error message indicating the timeout. This is usually harmless. BZ 701314

For a list of issues that still exist in the very latest RHQ 4 code, see Bugzilla.

Translations

The GWT part of the UI has partially been translated into German, Portuguese, Japanese and Chinese. You can e.g. access the German UI
by appending

?locale=de

to the base url like for example

http://localhost:7080/coregui/?locale=de

Locales are:

• zh for Chinese
• de for German
• ja for Japanese
• pt for Portuguese

Please ping us if you want to help translating the UI to your language.

Bug reporting

Please report all bugs you find in Bugzilla. If you find a bug that has been recorded in the above list, please leave a comment on them especially if this needs special steps to reproduce.

Download

You can download the release here.