After several months of beta releases, the final version of RHQ 3.0, a multi-vendor management project, was released this week.  The seven early community releases have had a few of the new features in the open source project.  This major release contains pluggable alert sensors and improved search capabilities among the new features.

RHQ is a systems management suite that is integrated in many products and platforms.  It's used for core features such as monitoring and graphing of values, alerting on error conditions, remote configuration of managed resources, and remote operation execution.  



RHQ implements a Server/Agent architecture which provides remote management.  Plugins provide extensible support for a number of managed products.  The project consists of layered modules for flexible deployment.  It has a core UI that provides access to audited and historical management for an entire enterprise.  RHQ provides the foundation for many enterprise administration, monitoring, alerting, and operational control tools; including Jopr and JBossON.

Here is a list of the main highlights in RHQ 3:

• Server side plugins - extend the server functionality by writing plugins
• Operations sender - lets you trigger alerts on arbitrary resources.
• Pluggable alert notification templates - write your own alert notification senders to e.g. integrate with a trouble ticket system
• Provisioning - deploy software centrally to managed platforms
• Repo Synchronization - Added the ability to schedule package synchronization for specific repos, as well as cancel a running sync.
• HTTP content access - Added the ability to browse content repositories and retrieve packages via HTTP.
• Support for authorization via LDAP groups
• Support for Oracle 11g
• Enable alerting on Call Time data ( Session Bean method stats, Web response times).
• Improved support for app server provisioning
• Improved support for configuring Apache
• Content Subsystem Performance Enhancements

New Inventory Browser

• Unified layout for browsing resources, groups, group definitions
• Summary counts update automatically

Alert UI Revamp

• Subject sender and roles sender are now available
• Alerts can be acknowledged
• Alert history detail now lists status from new senders and shows failed emails

Raw Configuration Support:

• View Configuration (multiple versions) for managed resource supporting (Structured, Raw, Both) configuration options
• Switch between Structured and Raw Configuration views for a managed resource supporting both
• Multiple file views
• Upload and download of configuration files
• Saving configuration changes to managed resource
• Rollback
• Validation (raw-only)    

One known issue that was not fixed in RHQ 3 is the lack of compatibility with PostgreSQL 9.0.

Download RHQ here.