Dire need for centralized logging

We have HA in some components of the application and any request can go to any of the tomcats in Data centre. The problem is that lately I have been asked to chase a lot of customer issues and its a PITA to grep logs across all machines and make a time line and then figure out what's going on. What we need is to log to some central server in addition to local box and then all these debugging things can be grepped here. We are finally picking logstash for this purpose because you can do lucene like search queries on customer name (we append customer name in thread). Also we generate a unique requestId for all requests coming to data centre which gets passed through many components. We would put all those logs in logstash so we can see how the request flows through all components. We would keep 1-2 months of logs else it would be tons of logs.

We are finally picking http://syslog4j.org/docs/javadoc/org/productivity/java/syslog4j/impl/log4j/Syslog4jAppender.html for this but running into some issues with appender. Will write a blog once I solve it.

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RabbitMQ java clients for beginners

Here is a sample of a consumer and producer example for RabbitMQ. The steps are
Download Erlang Download Rabbit MQ Server Download Rabbit MQ Java client jarsCompile and run the below two class and you are done.
This sample create a Durable Exchange, Queue and a Message. You will have to start the consumer first before you start the for the first time.

For more information on AMQP, Exchanges, Queues, read this excellent tutorial
http://blogs.digitar.com/jjww/2009/01/rabbits-and-warrens/

+++++++++++++++++RabbitMQProducer.java+++++++++++++++++++++++++++
import com.rabbitmq.client.Connection; import com.rabbitmq.client.Channel; import com.rabbitmq.client.*; public class RabbitMQProducer { public static void main(String []args) throws Exception { ConnectionFactory factory = new ConnectionFactory(); factory.setUsername("guest"); factory.setPassword("guest"); factory.setVirtualHost("/"); factory.setHost("127.0.0.1"); factory.setPort(5672); Conne…

Logging to Graphite monitoring tool from java

We use Graphite as a tool for monitoring some stats and watch trends. A requirement is to monitor impact of new releases as build is deployed to app nodes to see if things like
1) Has the memcache usage increased.
2) Has the no of Java exceptions went up.
3) Is the app using more tomcat threads.
Here is a screenshot

We changed the installer to log a deploy event when a new build is deployed. I wrote a simple spring bean to log graphite events using java. Logging to graphite is easy, all you need to do is open a socket and send lines of events.
import org.slf4j.Logger;import org.slf4j.LoggerFactory; import java.io.OutputStreamWriter; import java.io.Writer; import java.net.Socket; import java.util.HashMap; import java.util.Map; public class GraphiteLogger { private static final Logger logger = LoggerFactory.getLogger(GraphiteLogger.class); private String graphiteHost; private int graphitePort; public String getGraphiteHost() { return graphiteHost; } public void setGraphite…

What a rocky start to labor day weekend

Woke up by earthquake at 7:00 AM in morning and then couldn't get to sleep. I took a bath, made my tea and started checking emails and saw that after last night deployment three storage node out of 100s of nodes were running into Full GC. What was special about the 3 nodes was that each one was in a different Data centre but it was named same app02. This got me curious I asked the node to be taken out of rotation and take a heap dump. Yesterday night a new release has happened and I had upgraded spymemcached library version as new relic now natively supports instrumentation on it so it was a suspect. And the hunch was a bullseye, the heap dump clearly showed it taking 1.3G and full GCs were taking 6 sec but not claiming anything.

I have a quartz job in each jvm that takes a thread dump every 5 minutes and saves last 300 of them, checking few of them quickly showed a common thread among all 3 data centres. It seems there was a long running job that was trying to replicate pending…

Programming fun at startup

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