Tamale's second open source project, monju, is now available in SourceForge. Monju is a Java framework for JBoss that makes JBoss application server's internal states available for Nagios remote monitoring system.

This framework was designed with flexibility and convenience in mind. It provides three different styles for implementing nagios checks. Users of the framework are free to choose the style of implementation that suits their needs. Writing a nagios check using the framework can be as easy as configuring Nagios to run the packaged nagios plug-in. Or, one can develop as complex a nagios check as the Java programming language allows.

Tamale relies on Nagios for monitoring hardware and software health of all appliance products deployed at customer sites. We will be the primary user of Monju framework. We will continue to make improvements on the framework, and make them available to the community. Our hope is that other Jboss/Nagios users will contribute bug reports, patches, and enhancements. In particular, writing new JMX-based checks is very easy within the framework, and we hope the development community for these critical technologies will add to the standard library of monju checks.

This first edition of Monju is small, simple and yet quite usable. One of the immediate task to do is to pre-package as many generally useful checks into the distribution as possible. We welcome suggestions for good pre-packaged checks.

Etymology
Monju is Japanese for Manjusri, "the bodhisattava of keen awareness" (Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manjusri). True, a notorious nuclear reactor in Japan is also named Monju, but no association should be made to it (besides the vivid lesson in the importance of effective and detailed monitoring). Think "keen awareness". Monju is also supposed to be an acronym for some indeterminate long name that contains highly technical jargons like "Monitoing", "Nagios", and "JBoss". We'll leave it at that. (editor's note: Monju author Michi Oshima denies reports that Monju stands for "Michi Oshima's Nagios JBoss Unifier" ).