Orbitz Open Sources Tools To Manage Large Distributed Applications

mjasay writes "CNET is reporting that on Monday Orbitz will announce the creation and release of two open-source projects, Extremely Reusable Monitoring API (ERMA) and Graphite, both 'part of a Complex Event Processing system designed to monitor large distributed applications, analyze the data that is gathered and display that data in real-time graphs.' Though there were hints of these projects at JavaOne earlier this year, Monday's announcement adds significant context to the work Orbitz has done to create two highly compelling open-source projects, whose applicability extends far beyond the travel industry. In particular, it highlights Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst's vision that enterprise IT needs to open up and collaborate. However, as Orbitz's development team notes, it's easier said than done to participate in open source, especially when creating projects rather than simply contributing to existing projects."

Re:are you guys still on jdk 1.4?

[dlb1]

not only that, 1.4.2 is going out of maintenance very soon: http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.4.2/ [sun.com]

Re:are you guys still on jdk 1.4?

[mokeefe]

Orbitz is actively moving to 1.6 and our entire new technology platform is already on 1.5. However with some older apps dating back to 2000 sharing this same monitoring API, it takes time.

Meanwhile, ERMA does have a separate build within the same codebase for 1.5 code including support for Annotations, etc, and we make use of backport-util-concurrent.

Re:are you guys still on jdk 1.4?

[mokeefe]

P.S. We also have some cool MonitorProcessors that use the java.lang.management package which is new to 1.5.

Re:Open Source What??

[baboonlogic]

This is much more informative than the summary...

ERMA [infoq.com]

From there:

Orbitz Worldwide, a leading global online travel company, has open sourced two monitoring tools Extremely Reusable Monitoring API (ERMA) and Graphite, a persistence and visualization component. ERMA is a home grown Java API and library that has been used in several web applications at Orbitz to capture monitoring statistics in the applications at run-time. It is the source of streams of events that are processed in order to raise alerts when a service is down or running slower than defined response time thresholds.

Another useful link [complexevents.com]