Deploying Plugins - Basic HOWTO

Deploying Your New Plugin in HQ

So you've just created or downloaded a new plugin. You think you've placed it in the right directories, so you fire up your browser and take a look at your HQ Dashboard, only to find that your plugin is nowhere to be found. Naturally, you ask, "Where's my plugin?" This mini-howto is about how to make sure your plugin is working correctly and put it to use.

Placing Your Plugin in the Right Directory

Hyperic HQ is an agent based monitoring system, and you must deploy the plugin on both the server and agent side. On the server side, HQ supports hot deployment of plugins if you place them in the directory <path to HQ home>/hq-plugins. However, if you have not already created that directory, creating that directory and placing your new plugin there will require a restart of HQ server.

On the agent side, HQ does not support hot deployment, so deploying a new plugin will require an agent restart. You may place the plugin in either <HQ root directory>/hq-plugins or in <HQ root directory>/<HQ agent dir>/pdk/plugins - which is where all of the plugins are placed by default.

Using the Plugin

Now that you've restarted your agent (necessary) and server (maybe necessary), it's time to check if you're new plugin shows up. If everything was done correctly, The plugin is now activated but won't be visible from the dashboard unless it uses HQ's auto-discovery ability.

To make sure the plugin is deployed, go to the platform name of the machine on which you installed the agent plugin - you can find this by clicking, from the Dashboard, 'Resources' -> 'Browse' and then 'Platforms'. There, you should see the platform on which you deployed your plugin. Click on the desired platform, which brings you to its default monitoring view.

In most cases, look in the upper right of the screen, click the "Tools Menu" and then select "New Platform Service". If you've created a server plugin, then you'll click 'Tools Menu' -> 'New Server' instead. On the next screen, add the name of the server or service you wish to monitor, whatever descriptive text you feel is necessary, and then select the name of your newly activated plugin from the "Service Type" or "Server Type" drop-down list. If your new plugin is for a server, you'll also have to add an install path so that HQ will know where to gather its configuration info.

Important: If you don't find your plugin name in the drop-down list, then something went wrong with your plugin - check your agent logs.

After clicking 'Ok' you'll come to a screen with the 'General Properties' section open. Scrolling to the bottom of the page, you should see 'Configuration Properties' - click it to open that section. From there, your options will depend on the plugin.