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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.
Here is an example graph produced by Orca from data logged by Shadowtail from an MBean monitoring a count of widget sales in a Java application.
Use Shadowtail to capture web app data that you wish to persist. JConsole gives you a snapshot of the data, but Shadowtail and Orca give you a picture over time. Here are some plots produced by Shadowtail and Orca of the JVM of a Tomcat instance.
Our passion for software development has led us to decide that we should share some of the tools we use with the Open Source community. Hence we are pleased to release ShadowTail as a GPLv2 licensed application.
The ShadowTail project Wiki, Forum, source, documentation and distribution can be found at  |
