vFabric Hyperic is a comprehensive enterprise application management tool. It manages and monitors all instances of vFabric tc Server on any computer, all Spring-powered applications, and a variety of other non-SpringSource platforms and application servers such as Apache Tomcat. HQ provides a single console with powerful dashboards from which you can easily check the health of your applications. With Hyperic HQ, you can:
Manage the lifecycle of tc Runtime instances by starting, stopping, and restarting local or remote instances.
Similarly manage the lifecycle of a group of tc Runtime instances that are distributed over a network of computers.
Configure a single instance of tc Runtime. Configuration options include the various port numbers to which the tc Runtime instance listens, JVM options such as heap size and enabling debugging, default server values for JSPs and static content, JDBC datasources, various tc Runtime connectors, and so on.
Configure a group of tc Runtime instances using the
tcsadmin command.
Deploy a Web application from an accessible file system, either local or remote. You can deploy to both a single tc Runtime instance or to a predefined group of servers.
Manage the lifecycle of applications deployed to a single tc Runtime instance or group of instances. Application lifecycle operations include start, stop, redeploy, undeploy, and reload.
In addition to the preceding tc Runtime-related actions, Hyperic HQ performs these standard tasks:
Inventories the resources on your network.
Monitors your resources.
Alerts you to problems with resources.
Controls the resources.
Getting Started with tc Server describes how to install and use Hyperic and provides a tutorial that demonstrates the most common tasks.
When using the HQ user interface, click on the Help link at the top of most pages for detailed online-help. You can also browse the vFabric HQ Documentation for additional information.
For simplicity, it is often assumed in this documentation that you
log in to the HQ user interface as the HQ super-user
(hqadmin) when you want to manage a tc Runtime instance. This
is not required, of course. You can also log in as a non-super user and
still use the tc Server HQ plugin features, as long as the user has the
correct permissions.
In HQ, users are assigned roles, which in turn are assigned permissions, such as View and Control. For general information about what each permission means with respect to server resources (such as a tc Runtime instance) in HQ, see Role Permissions in HQ Enterprise in the Hyperic documentation. For general information about the default users in HQ and creating new ones, see HQ User Accounts.
The following table describes the additional effects that some of the HQ permissions have on the tc Server HQ plugin features. Use this table to determine which role you should assign a user that will be managing tc Runtime instances.
Table 3.1. HQ Permission Effects on tc Server HQ Plugin Features
| Permission | Additional Effect on tc Server HQ Plugin Features |
|---|---|
| View | Allows the user to:
|
| Modify | Allows the user to:
|
| Control | Allows the user to use the commands in the Control tab to start, stop, and restart a tc Runtime instance. |