Integration with ManageIQ

A blog post by Heiko W. Rupp

announcement | manageiq | ruby



When we started Hawkular some time ago, we did it under the slogan of "The Open Source Monitoring and Management Platform". And since then we have achieved a lot and built components like our metrics store, a powerful graph-oriented inventory or awesome alerting functionality. And on top of all that a very nice and snappy Web 2.0 UI.

It also became clear during development that users not only want excellent Middleware management, which is the focus of Hawkular, but also need to know if for example slowness of the application is coming from other components of the stack way below the application server. Which is why we are partnering with the ManageIQ project.

Collaborating with ManageIQ

ManageIQ provides a huge amount of functionality to manage and monitor virtual machines and containers on VMWare, EC2, OpenStack, OpenShift, Azure, Rhevm and many more, which nicely complements the application-centric view of Hawkular.

ManageIQ has all the knowledge about the OS and infrastructure the Middleware servers are running on, where Hawkular only provides some basic information. ManageIQ can be used to provision new VMs and containers with Middleware in them, which can then be monitored and managed by Hawkular.

ManageIQ itself operates as manager of managers, where it does not directly talk to a WildFly server, a VM or a container, but rather tells Hawkular, oVirt or Kubernetes to act on its behalf. ManageIQ then displays the results of these actions in its UI.

The Hawkular team will, together with the ManageIQ team, build a so called provider integration in ManageIQ. This integration lives inside the ManageIQ code base and talks to Hawkular over the Hawkular-Ruby-Client gem. This integration brings to ManageIQ the infrastructure needed to talk to the Hawkular server as manager and thus the connected Middleware servers. This work includes work on the ManageIQ UI to show the managed Middleware.

Hawkular and ManageIQ
Figure 1. Overall architecture

First results of the new collaboration

An initial outcome of this work can already be seen in the Hawkular-client Ruby gem, that is used by the provider to talk to the Hawkular server.

Another big milestone is the initial version of the Hawkular-Provider-integration inside ManageIQ master.

Middelware tab in ManageIQ
Figure 2. Middleware tab in ManageIQ




Published by Heiko W. Rupp on 23 February 2016

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© 2016 | Hawkular is released under Apache License v2.0