EPA vs? PPK

[Legacy User]

we are currently looking in a way to better monitor our webserver infra and there are multiple solutions available e.g. the WebServer Power Pack or the EPA with some perl plugins and basicaly its flexibility and we fancy both.

what i thought in the end why can't be any PPK as well just be a plugin for EPA?

e.g. the Webserver power pack provides us the status page parsing but the url lookup and some own written logfile parsing clases we actualy like as well which we can implement with EPA.

now should we run two java processes doing a similar job or would it be just mor efficient to somehow combine this two?

[Haruhiko Davis]

I guess it depends on what you're trying to accomplish.

EPA certainly is more extensible, whereas WS PPK can't be modified by end users. You could utilize wget or Lynx browser to get the same remote access ability in reading webpages (deploy once, use everywhere). I love the PPK for its simplicity in deployment. You will certainly have to spend some development cycles to get near that functionality. Not that it's hard, just some thought in how you would enact it. If using Perl, utilize PrintMetric module from the EPA to create your XML metric output.

You can certainly guess which way I lean towards. It's all a matter of available resources and maintainability.

-Hiko

[Legacy User]

I can only agree on the fact that the WS PPK is good and has clearly as you mentioned its benefits.

The main question for me is really why can i not combine in a standardized way the PPKs with the EPA in to a single agent a single java process and use both benefits without haeving to run multiple different processes. Similar to the way as its possible with the different PPKs and extensions available for the JavaAgent.

E.g. we did a stateful java class extension for a very dynamic and efficient log analysis to the EPA and im just wondering if something similar could be done in a standardized way for the CA PPKs by making it possible of just adding them as a "module" to the EPA.

[Haruhiko Davis]

I see what you're saying now.

I have an FieldPack from the old community that allows you turn Python/Jython scripts into EPA Java plugins. If you're interested in seeing/using it, let me know.

One of the things we'd need to work out is a standard way of providing configuration files, similar to the agent/EPA profile. Log4j provides a good example of doing that.