User:Kthompsobass/sandbox

Owl is an application monitoring, system monitoring, and network monitoring software application. Owl monitors the status of applications and computer hardware as well as business metrics in order to give a complete view of a system. Alerts are sent when observed behavior diverges from expected or acceptable behavior, either in software performance or any type of business metric. Owl uses instrumentation to collect data directly from applications.

Owl's Central runs on Linux, Solaris, and other Unix variants.

Owl's collection agent (Blackbird) runs on Windows and Unix variants.

It was developed by software vendor and professional services company Integrasolv.

Overview
Owl is made up of two distinct applications, Owl Central and Blackbird (Collection Agent). Owl Central is a multithreaded java based application.


 * Monitors process and connection data collected by Blackbird.
 * Auto discovers instrumented applications
 * Alerts users to unexpected or undesired behavior
 * Executes controls within applications
 * Manages exceptions in applications
 * Self monitoring
 * Owl Map displays entities and connections in an interactive multi-tiered map
 * Graphs metrics onto histogram for display and analysis
 * Implements a rule-based system

Blackbird
Blackbird is Owl's collection agent. It has several methods by which it collects data from applications. Through these collection methods owl can collect such metrics as queue length, transaction time, thread status and more.

Collection Methods

 * Direct instrumentation of the blackbird library (C, C++, C, VB, Java)
 * Log files (Perl)
 * API Proxy
 * JMX Bridge - Enables automatic support for JMX instrumented applications such as Apache tomcat
 * Application Adapter

Owl Dashboard
Owl is fully integrated with Crystal dashboard design (formerly known as Xcelsius). Users can create customized dashboards using Crystal Dashboard Design and connect them to data output from Owl using Owl's web services API.