Development Resources
Development Resources
You can extend HQ's functionality in many directions — manage a new product or gather different metric data — thanks to Hyperic HQ's emphasis on abstraction (in its implementation, data display, and management). This page summarizes the ways in which you can tweak HQ to make it just the way you like it. If you haven't already, consider getting an overview of the product before investigating the advanced features below.
Also, in your journey, you will likely find it useful to communicate either with Hyperic or with other Hyperic users. Hyperic welcomes feedback and enhancement requests through our Jira or through our community forums. Also, many of our support forums are backed by mailing lists.
Extending HQ via Plugins
If you are looking to simply extend HQ's capabilities to manage new products, you can write a plugin (the interface between Hyperic HQ and the managed product). And you can start in the Plugin Development Center. Hyperic maintains a broad list of plugins, a.k.a., supported products, and users are welcome to add to it.
As an example, you might have a router or switch that is currently not listed in our list of supported products. Most network devices expose metrics through SNMP and can be monitored using Hyperic's generic Network Device plugin, which covers the standard set of metrics exposed via the IF-MIB (RFC 1213). However, if the device exposes additional information, you can write a pure XML plugin to gather that information.
In general, any product or device that exposes metrics or inventory information through Scripting, JMX, SNMP, SQL or Windows PDH can be monitored in HQ without writing any Java code. The Plugin Development Center has some examples to get you started.
 | Writing Plugins Does Not Require Building HQ from Source In general, HQ plugins can be written in pure XML. More complex plugins that require Java code can be compiled against our PDK jar's, removing the need to build HQ from source. |
SIGAR (System Information Gatherer and Report)
The Sigar API provides a portable interface for gathering system information such as:
- System memory, swap, cpu, load average, uptime
- Per-process memory, cpu, credential info, state, arguments, environment, open files
- File system detection and metrics
- Network interface configuration info and metrics
from a variety of platforms.
Installing from Source Code
There are two ways to obtain the Hyperic HQ source code:
- Download the source package directly from Sourceforge
- Check out the tree from SVN. To checkout from SVN, run:
svn co http://svn.hyperic.org/projects/hq/trunk hq
Once you have the source code, follow the build instructions for building and deploying the application.