Nirvana Concepts - Administration and Management

In addition to its communications APIs and features Nirvana provides a sophisticated collection of management tools and APIs. These tools and APIs are designed exclusively for:

Nirvana's management client, the Enterprise Manager is written using the same management APIs thus demonstrating the powerful features of these features.

Statistical Data

Through the use of the Nirvana management API clients can access a very detailed range of performance related data. Performance metrics can be gathered at many levels ranging from the realm throughput statistics to individual client connection round trip latency details. An example can be found in the realm log and audit listener.

Management Event Monitoring

Most client and server induced actions in Nirvana result in a management event being created. Asynchronous listeners can be created using the management API that enables management clients to capture these events. As an example consider a client connection to a Nirvana realm server. This creates a client connection event. A management client at this point might dynamically create channel resources for said client and programmatically set ACL’s. An example can be found in the connection watch sample.

Resource Creation

Resources can all be created programmatically using the Nirvana Administration API. Coupled with statistical data and event monitoring resources can be created on the fly to support users in specific operational configurations. For example, create channel x when user x logs in OR change channel ACL when realm throughput exceeds a specific value. An ACL creation example can be found in the add queue acl sample.

Configuration Management

Every Nirvana Server has a number of configurable parameters. In addition specific interfaces supporting specific protocols and plugins can be added to Nirvana realms. Nirvana’s configuration management feature allow clients to snapshot configurations and generate configuration XML files. New realms can be very quickly configured with the XML files enabling the very fast bootstrapping of new environments. The Enterprise Manager documentation has this XML sample.

3rd Party Integration

While Nirvana’s Administration API can be using directly to integrate with 3rd party products Nirvana servers also support JMX and (security permitting) can be queried by any JMX management tool.