We are pleased to announce that we have released an Open Source project called ShadowTail to the world at large.

Shadowtail is a Java/Spring framework for gathering numerical data (statistics) about a Java application, and writing the data to files. It is particularly useful as a source of data to feed Orca, the free tool for plotting textual data onto a directory on a Web server.

Why would you want to use Shadowtail?

Shadowtail helps you to monitor your software application or service by logging application and application container data over time. The data format is suitable for plotting or for analysis.

Suppose you have a web application selling widgets. Your sales manager would like to monitor and record application data on turnover and number of widgets sold, analyzed by day, week and month. Your operations manager would like to monitor JVM data on heap usage and number of classes loaded. A combination of Shadowtail, Java MBeans in your web app, and Orca will give you the data in raw format and in graphs.

Shadowtail provides Java classes and example Spring configurations to gather and record:

• timestamp data
• MBeans data from a remote server via JMX
  

Shadowtail was written by John Cooke of Black Pepper Software and prepared for open sourcing by Julia Dain and David Johnson, also of Black Pepper Software. It is licensed under the GPLv2.

It is being hosted at SourceForge as the ShadowTail project. The source and documentation is available by SVN from SourceForge and the site documentations is being worked on.

We hope that you will make good use of it and provide us with feedback.