On January 11th, we held our normal monthly meeting on the subject of RHQ and JBoss Operarions Network.  Alan Santos and Ian Springer were on hand to show some of the new GWT-goodness and cool features in RHQ and JON.  Drift management, Inventoring of Platforms, Services and Servers, Alerts and Events, and many more. The insight provided by RHQ was eye-opening to many of the members and quickly started the wheels turning in few people's head about how they could replace their propriertary monitoring and alerting systems with this open source product.

Next up in the group was Steve Sturtevant of OC Systems with his demonstration of the extensibility of RHQ.  His product, RTI performance, provides the ability to do root-cause analysis of applications by providing insight into the business transactions and correlating to the system resources that RHQ/JON identifies. To see more what RTI is and see how it works, you can checkout the series of videos on YouTube.:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VkaHHTz9gH0

Kudos to the RHQ-Project team as the features in 4.0 as well as the new GUI are excellent.  I for one can't wait to take RHQ for a spin and put that Drift management to test.   I am also impressed the RTI performance add in.  The ability to quickly identify long running transactions and pin-point the resources involved is a much welcome addition.