I followed the discussion the last 3 day and I still wondering why nobody turned up with an integration of solr monitoring and administration functionality using javas fantastic management extension JMX. I joined a team 2 years ago building a distributed webspider / searcher (similar to nutch). In the middle of the development process someone came up with monitoring the system via the admin frontend which communicates via http with the indexer, spider and searcher part of the system. At that time I was playing arround with jmx building a generic server side monitoring app. and suggested to use JMX for all the monitoring. It turned out in a very handy and easy to use solution. This would also solve a couple of problems about blowing up the core with extra features if you create the jmx monitoring in a extra jar as a contrib feature. You wouldn't need to write a frontend neither and everybody who is used to his JMX Monitoring frontend could use it to monitor solr as well. Loading custom classes and monitor the desired behaviour might be much easier to implement and to analyze. Additionally jmx supports memory behaviour monitoring with java 1.5. Another feature is triggering some messages to global monitoring systems if errors or undesired behaviour of managed components occur which could also be exposed via JMX.
Also security / firewall doubts would not concern the core and its security as jmx connectors can be blocked by firewalls not using the same port as solr does (no matter which protocol is used to connect to the server). As I'm not very familiar with the solr core I spotted some Info MBeans in solr which would be accessible without writing any code as well. After all I do have to admin that accessing all these features via JMX would not be as user friendly as a hand made http frontend would be but I a search server admin / manage frontend exposed to people without any background?! I would also be happy to contribute my experience with JMX to the project. best regards Simon
