UConsole Architecture
The architecture of the UConsole begins from the JMX in the UltraESB back-end where the actual management and monitoring aspects executed via the newly re-factored MXBeans. We have converted from MBeans to MXBeans because of the easiness of management with the MXBeans and the ability to serve complex data as CompositeData objects which can be deconstructed at the management console level easily to provide the management services.
These management services are completely restful and uses the JSON as the media type for the communication. In implementing that we have used Apache Wink deployed on Jetty. So when ever you login to the UltraESB web management console the browser front-end talks to the Wink application serving a set of JSON admin services running on Jetty. These admin services then talks to the UltraESB server via JMX and serves the request from the browser with the content loaded via JMX from the actual UltraESB server.
Now if you look at the browser front-end it is designed to be completely asynchronous and uses AJAX to talk to the Wink JSON services. We mainly use JavaScript with heavy use of jQuery as the key JavaScript framework. However the key piece of code that does the rendering from JSON data received from the Wink application into HTML is PURE and it is really capable of rendering JSON into HTML. At the front end we have been heavily using DataTables to render all the tabular data while using many other jquery.ui extensions to improve the console usability.
The authentication and authorization has been handled by the Apache Shiro framework, which registers as a servlet filer to the Wink RestServlet. That was the uconsole architecture in brief, and the above diagram shows the structure of the console.
UConsole in-action
The management console with the above simple nice architecture gives you a very valuable set of management capabilities for the UltraESB. Assuming that you are running a local UltraESB instance with the console on the same physical machine (which can be started with the uconsole.bat or uconsole.sh scripts available in the bin directory of the UltraESB), it is capable of auto-detecting that node. To manage the locally running node you need to login to the console.
Use the default username and password pair to login to the console which are "admin" and "admin" respectively. If you are managing a remote UltraESB server you need to specify the JMX URL of that UltraESB server on the appropriate input box with the user name and password.Once you login, you will be able to see a dashboard with different graphs showing the state of the UltraESB server to which you are connected to. There will be 2 more tabs giving you the information on the system and a good set of references for getting started with the UltraESB. One important feature of the UConsole is, it's context sensitive help. If you click on the help icon right next to the heading of any page you will be provided with a nice context sensitive help as shown below;
If we look at the capabilities of this handy console, we better go through the navigation menu of the console to get an understanding of the each and every page it presents.
The first item is the dashboard that we have already talked about and the rest of it can be found in a nice colapsible menu. If you expand that menu, you will be able to see 2 major categories except for the Log viewer, which presents the tail of the log rendered into the console. The 2 major divisions of the UConsole is Node Management and Cluster Management while node management enabled you to manage artifacts on the logged in UltraESB server node, the cluster management section helps you to manage/monitor the complete cluster of the UltraESB from a single console. This comes in very handy when you have a cluster of UltraESBs and you want the central point of management for all the nodes in the cluster.Under node management, you will get into a tabular list view of all the listed artifact types like, proxy services, sequences, endpoints and so forth. Do not forget to check on the context sensitive help on those pages to get some help as to what each and every page is intended to and what operations you can invoke from those pages. Apart from that, on the top right corner of the detailed artifact pages you will be able to see a control panel and you can use that control panel to invoke the operations for that artifact.
Moving fast to the cluster management, you will only be able to see the submenu section of the cluster management if you have clustering enabled, you may refer to my previous blog or the Clustered deployment of UltraESB article on how to enable clustering and run an UltraESB cluster. This section gives you the complete control over the cluster, where you can navigate through the nodes, to sessions in the cluster and gives a command history view. The most important bit is the control panel and it allows you to issue the cluster controlling commands from the UConsole and monitor those command states, and who has executed that command and so forth.
That is about the usage. Now if you look at the console header banner and the top
right corner you will be able to see the Sign Out an another important feature named Switch Server switch server can be used to switch to another UltraESB node from the one you have been managing. While it can be used to switch to any UltraESB server if you are logged into a node in a given cluster, you will get the liberty of selecting a node in the cluster without typing it in.So this turned out to be a bit long blog, but still I have many more to share with you all. Anyway you need to have a look at this awesome piece of software and get a feel of it. Download it now to get started with it.
