Development Resources
Hyperic HQ's emphasis on abstraction (in its implementation, data display, and management) allows users to extend the product in many directions to suit their needs. This page summarizes the ways in which users can tweak HQ to make it just the way they 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. Many of our support forums are backed by mailing lists if you prefer communicating through email.
Extending HQ via Plugins
If you are looking to simply extend HQ's capabilities by writing additional plugins the Plugin Development Center is a good place to start. Hyperic currently maintains a broad list of plugins, but there is always room for additional product support.
As an example, you might have a router or switch that is currently not listed in our supported list of 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 a pure XML plugin can be written 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 your 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. You can download the source package directly from Sourceforge, or checkout the tree from SVN. To checkout from SVN run:
svn co http://svn.hyperic.org/projects/hq/trunk hq
Once you have downloaded the source, see the Build Instructions document on how to build and deploy the application.
