As part of the larger vFabric 5.1 release this week, VMware’s Hyperic, the web infrastructure monitoring software bundled with the vFabric Suite, delivered on an upgrade to managing Apache Tomcat, the world’s most popular application server. As summarized in the blog post today, Hyperic upgraded support for Tomcat in three major ways:

1. Support for Apache Tomcat 7. Version 7 is gaining adoption in the marketplace, including with enterprise users. To further support this, the latest release for Hyperic adds support for Apache Tomcat 7, the latest stable release published by the Apache Software Foundation.

2. Improve Internal Use of Tomcat. Hyperic relies on Tomcat as its internal application server. The new version provides two new server configuration properties to better manage the how many threads are available to the Hyperic Server’s internal Tomcat server. The new parameters are set for deployments of less than 50 platforms, and are configurable for larger deployments to increase performance. For more details, see the complete blog post.

3. New Detailed Configuration History Tracking for Tomcat. Hyperic 4.6.5 provides new detail on changes in configuration files that identifies the type of change including "add", "delete", "modify", or "rename" to a file and also specify the actual changes in text files, helping administrators to answer the question, “What changed?” more quickly. In addition to Apache Tomcat this feature is now available for Apache, WebSphere, WebLogic Server, JBoss, PostgreSQL, mySQL, and Oracle. For more information on how to use this new configuration tracking, see the Hyperic documentation, see "Log and Configuration Event Tracking" in vFabric Hyperic Overview for more about the configuration tracking functionality, and see "FileChangeTrackPlugin" in vFabric Hyperic Plug-in Development for more about the new support class.

For more information on other improvements included in this release, please see the release notes or check out the documentation. Note: Hyperic documentation has moved, old versions can be found at support.hyperic.com, while new versions have moved to the vFabric 5 Documentation Center.

About the Author: Stacey Schneider has over 15 years of working with technology, with a focus on working with sales and marketing automation as well as internationalization. Schneider has held roles in services, engineering, products and was the former head of marketing and community for Hyperic before it was acquired by SpringSource and VMware. She is now working as a product marketing manager across the vFabric products at VMware, including  supporting Hyperic. Prior to Hyperic, Schneider held various positions at CRM software pioneer Siebel Systems, including Group Director of Technology Product Marketing, a role for which her contributions awarded her a patent. Schneider received her BS in Economics with a focus in International Business from the Pennsylvania State University.