Monitor the portal

Supplier Portal is a Java-based web application that runs in J2EE-compatible servlet containers like Apache Tomcat, which in turn run in their own process.

There are tools available to monitor system-level processes, as well as the Apache Tomcat Java process. To ensure that the portal runs continuously, you regularly need to monitor system-level processes, such as the CPU and memory consumption of a Java process under which Tomcat is running.

The portal also exposes http services, which can be periodically called to perform the following checks.

• Health status check informs you if the Web Application is running

• Memory consumption checks availability, usage, and available space for processing

• Number of active sessions reports the number of currently active users

Depending upon the OS environment, there are various ways to call these services periodically and generate statistics for monitoring and study. For example, in Windows, you can install the cURL tool and create a batch script to call these services and receive responses that can be written in a csv file. This script can then be scheduled to run every minute or so, depending upon how granular the metrics need to be.

There are also online services available that allow the gathering of such metrics. For more information about plugins available for monitoring Tomcat, see the New Relic website.