REST API for message level and system level metrics for the XML Gateway

In my first few weeks at Vordel, I've been spending a lot of time on the "cool" part of the product - building circuits and policies. As a developer, I really enjoy (am amazed) at how quickly you can know things out. But this is a job after all, so I also have to spend time coming up to speed on some of the less "glamorous" yet really important and valuable features of the product.

I've started to look at the various administrative interfaces in the product and see what makes them tick. One really powerful feature of the Vordel XML Gateway is its out-of-the-box real time monitoring capabilities. The application itself is a Flash app that displays all of the details of the usage of the gateway - successful messages, blocked messages, failed messages - traffic to various remote hosts.

One thing that it also has is the system utilization - memory and CPU. This is really nice because you can get both the message (application level) and system-level information from a single source. This makes the task of integrating this information into an enterprise operations system much simpler. But how do you get at the information. Simple, http://gateway:8090/metrics



Notice that I'm just accessing the URL form a browser and you can see both the system information, as well as all of the statistics for the messages.

This is the same URL that the flash application accesses to retrieve the information in the real time monitor. The URL is protected with HTTP Basic authentication (all of the admin services are out of the box) so access is restricted as well as audited. Now that you know that the REST API is available, you can integrate this information into your environment.