New Graphical Monitoring

Details: Published on Friday, 21 September 2012 02:00

you might feel like us and liked the graphical creation of your Mule workflows offered by Saddle and MuleStudio. So you might also wonder why can't monitoring it work the same way? And you are right! That's why we created the new Saddle monitoring for Mule CE and EE. In this article you will learn about how to graphically monitor your Mule workflows, trace messages and view statistics or log files directly in your browser.

Those of you who ever used Saddle's old monitoring for Mule 2 may already know the possibilities of tracing messages through a running Mule system and being able to determine problems in a workflow.

However this old version was not able to work with Mule 3.x or even flows as it was pretty strongly bound to Mule 2. So we decided to redo everything from scratch and build a shiny new monitoring tool for Saddle. And this is what it looks like (click the image for a bigger view):

What you see there is the result of tracing some messages through a mule configuration consisting of two flows.

The list of traced messages shows how many messages will be traced until the given limit has been reached (here 21 mesage are yet to be traced) and also when a message came in, how long it took to get through the flow and whether there was an exception or not.

messageentries

If there was an exception you can get more information about it, including the stack trace by just clicking the excetpion icon.

In the lower area of the image you see the representation of your payload.

messagetree

If you use Saddle's Field architecture and are already familiar with it you will instantly understand the display in the monitoring tool as we are very close to the display in the template designer and tester here. All other types of payload are displayed as their String representation if possible. If the content could not be read or not be transformed into a String a message will be displayed, telling you that the content could not be displayed.

In case of an exception during the processing of your workflow, you might to want have access to the logs of your running mule application for further investigation. Just click the button "Log file" and you will get a live view of your logs directly in your browser (click to enlarge).

No more searching in the filesystem for the log files and displaying them in another application. You can even change the log level after the log has been generated. So if you know you only want to see errors and later on watch the trace messages you can just switch your logging to the "ERROR" level until the exception you are looking for occurs and later switch it to "TRACE" to see everything.

listonly

Of course, besides flows the new monitoring also supports services. We currently support Mule 2.2 to 3.3, meaning all mule versions supported by Saddle are also supported by the monitoring.

We hope to increase your productivity and perhaps save you some headaches when trying to figure out what's going wrong in your workflow.

If you want to try the new monitoring just click the eye-icon in the workflow designer toolbar before deploying a workflow. Saddle will then automatically launch your default web browser with the address of the monitoring frontend after the workflow has been deployed.