Being able to diagnose a performance problem in real time is great. But what happens when a colleague or a customer asks you to diagnose a problem that occured a week ago or if you're only notified after a JVM crashes?
A lot of people I know started using djigger because it's such a simple and intuitive tool. Recently I've tried to convince them to go ahead and set up a collector so that they wouldn't even have to worry about sampling anymore and so that they could analyze their problems "on demand", i.e regardless of the time perspective. It turned out I didn't have any convincing to do. The need was definitely something they wanted us to address and I've gotten a lot of positive feedback on this feature, which takes us one step closer to releasing a full APM-mode.
Whether you're wanting to monitor production JVMs efficiently or you're a developer wanting to take advantage of passive monitoring, you'll probably enjoy the simplicity of djigger's collector mode. It's worth mentioning that the retry mechanism built into the collector allows a developer to not have to worry about uptimes. As long as a JMX server is running in your program and regardless of when that program is running, the collector will attempt to connect and resume sampling after a down period.
All you have to do is set up a config file describing the connection and flag information of the JVMs you wish to monitor, start a mongoDB instance and the collector will do the rest for you !
I've actually just released a short video tutorial on youtube to guide you through these steps. Enjoy !
