Collection of custom metrics

[anantha_hyperic]

I went through video demos of hyperic and understood how (easily) one can setup monitoring for a web application.

Apart from monitoring and metrics collection of standard stuff like DB,Tomcat server etc, I want to collect specific metrics of my application like
-- How many visitors/sessions are active currently
-- What is the time taken for a call to a particular method/operation (tp99/tp99.9)
-- How many times a specific exception was thrown by the application
-- How many times each operation was called, assuming my application supports many operations like search,update, create

Can I use hyperic for this(and is it the right way to achieve it)?
Should I write metrics to a log file and parse it
OR should I use JMX plugins?

Thanks,

[excowboy]

Hi,

what kind of application do you want to monitor ?
An easy way to setup monitoring is a Script Plugin. The output of the script must be: key=value
There is an excellent howto:
http://support.hyperic.com/display/DOC/Script+Plugin+Tutorial

I wouldn't prefer writing the metrics to logfiles and parse it.

Cheers,
Mirko

[anantha_hyperic]

Its a java/jsp based application and application would be performing tasks like login,search catalog,register/order.

For my case, I think solution would be :
application needs to be take care of logging occurrence of each custom metric and script plugin needs to parse these logs and produce key=value kind of output for every metric I need

Thanks for the reply