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Delighted to be speaking at Into the Box 2024, coming to DC in May

I'm delighted to announce that I've been selected to speak at Into the Box 2024, in DC, coming up in May. This will be my 5th time presenting at this wonderful event, going back to my first time in 2017.

My talk will be...

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What's new in FusionReactor 9.2.0, released Jan 18 2023

If you're a user of the wonderful FusionReactor monitoring and observability solution (for ColdFusion, Lucee, Java servers and more), you may delight in hearing news of a new FusionReactor (FR) version. 9.2.0 was released last week, Jan 18, 2023.

You can learn more (in brief) about what's new in the bullets for 9.2.0 offered at the release notes page.

TLDR: For some folks, news of the new version is all the need to hear. For those who may like to hear a bit more about the update, read on.

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Exciting news coming in FusionReactor webinar this Thursday

The FusionReactor folks will offer a webinar this Thurs, Mar 24, at noon US Eastern, "Introducing Distributed tracing and on-prem observability".

I highly recommend that FusionReactor users (and others) register. (Even if you can't attend, you will get access to the recording.) It's about some totally new capabilities:

  • Note that it's about changes coming in both the FR Cloud and in the traditional "on-prem" FR UI. As such, the new capabilities should be very compelling even for those FR users who have not yet bothered to (or for some reason cannot ) use FR Cloud
  • Also, it's about more than what's been made available yet to those beta testing the new "logging" feature in FR Cloud
  • Finally, for those who DO use FR Cloud, there may be discussion of upcoming changes regarding the FR Cloud UI itself

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Speaking at CFCamp 2019, for the 10th talk/7th year!

Note: This blog post is from 2019. Some content may be outdated--though not necessarily. Same with links and subsequent comments from myself or others. Corrections are welcome, in the comments. And I may revise the content as necessary.
Following on my recent announcement about speaking at CF Summit 2019, I am delighted to announce also that I've been selected to speak at CFCamp 2019, in Munich this October.

This will be my sixth year in a row presenting at this wonderful event, and my seventh year total. It will also be my 10th presentation there. (You can see all my past presentations, including when and where offered, at carehart.org/presentations.)

FWIW, half of those talks have been "sponsor" presentations on behalf of Intergral, the makers of FusionReactor, while the rest were not. And despite the title of my talk this year, "Comparing Monitoring Solutions for CF and Lucee", it is NOT an FR-sponsored talk. See the description below, for more.

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What's new in FusionReactor 7.3 - over a dozen useful new features and enhancements

Note: This blog post is from 2018. Some content may be outdated--though not necessarily. Same with links and subsequent comments from myself or others. Corrections are welcome, in the comments. And I may revise the content as necessary.
FusionReactor (my favorite server monitor) continues its onward march of refinement and improvement with its latest release which came out last week, 7.3. In this post, I highlight over a dozen of its new features and improvements.

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FusionReactor, how do I love thee? Let me count the ways (a new blog series)

Note: This blog post is from 2018. Some content may be outdated--though not necessarily. Same with links and subsequent comments from myself or others. Corrections are welcome, in the comments. And I may revise the content as necessary.
Many will know that I'm a huge fan of FusionReactor, the monitoring tool (and more) for ColdFusion, Lucee, or any Java server (Tomcat, Jetty, Glassfish, JBoss, Wildfly, WebLogic, etc). And now I want to start a new series of posts on it. For more, read on.

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VisualVM failing to find plugins/updates? Solving the 503 error with an updated URL

Note: This blog post is from 2017. Some content may be outdated--though not necessarily. Same with links and subsequent comments from myself or others. Corrections are welcome, in the comments. And I may revise the content as necessary.
Have you tried to update or simply see the available plugins for VisualVM (the Java monitoring tool built into the JDK), and found that it fails to respond right away (the progress bar will show "checking") and then it reports:

Unable to connect to the Java VisualVM Plugins Center because of Server returned HTTP response code: 503 for URL: http://www.oracle.com/splash/java.net/maintenance/index.html

There is a solution.

TLDR: the quick answer is to change the URL used by the tool (Tools>Plugins>Settings) to use a new URL, such as https://visualvm.github.io/uc/8u131/updates.xml.gz.


For those who'd appreciate more detail, read on.

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New whitepapers from Adobe on ColdFusion 2016: lockdown, migration, and performance

Note: This blog post is from 2016. Some content may be outdated--though not necessarily. Same with links and subsequent comments from myself or others. Corrections are welcome, in the comments. And I may revise the content as necessary.
Continuing my series of posts on new things in CF2016 which some may miss,there are some new resources from Adobe about CF 2016, posted in recent days. (I suppose we may see a post from Adobe on their blog at some point, but I wanted to share it in the meantime.)

You can find them listed as "whitepapers" at the bottom of ColdFusion.com (as I view it today, at least), so keep an eye there to see if perhaps any others may ever be added.

Here are the docs, with some observations also about their size and version, if available:

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The ColdFusion 'metrics log', an oft-missed or misunderstood feature, 'new' since CF10 (Part 1)

Note: This blog post is from 2016. Some content may be outdated--though not necessarily. Same with links and subsequent comments from myself or others. Corrections are welcome, in the comments. And I may revise the content as necessary.
I'd like to take a diversion from my recent posts focused on CF2016 and talk about something that applies (and should interest) anyone using CF 10, 11, or 2016.

Have you heard of the new "metrics log" option that was enabled in CF10? If you have not, it's worth knowing about (there's precious little documentation, and I'll point to it, and give you still more info to help you use it). It's a useful, low-impact mechanism to get some high-level metrics logged by CF every 60 seconds (by default), and stored along with other CF logs.

If you did know about it, you've probably had some problems with it. Why does it show "nulls"? What do reported metrics really mean? Why do they not jive with what I'd expect to be the numbers reported?

In this post, and a Part 2 to come, I will introduce the metrics log, pointing out some key things you need to know to have it setup to work at all, and then I'll share my observations of things I've come to understand about the reported metrics.

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Monitoring ColdFusion web server connectors, more on Tomcat 'Status Workers'

Note: This blog post is from 2015. Some content may be outdated--though not necessarily. Same with links and subsequent comments from myself or others. Corrections are welcome, in the comments. And I may revise the content as necessary.
If you're running CF 10 or above, there was a very interesting post on the Adobe CF blog, from July 19 2015, entitled, Configuring Status Worker in Connectors. The Adobe blog post title may not have caught your attention, but it's about setting up a lightweight and built-in Tomcat monitoring feature for observing the status of the Tomcat web server connector.

You may want to consider enabling it, but I would add some caveats and observations that I share below. Note that it's really quite easy to enable, and DOES NOT require a restart of CF (only of your web server, or technically in IIS, a recycling of the application pool/s--a web site restart is not enough) to take effect.

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