ITCAMfRTT 6.1 supports Tomcat as a monitored app server

With ITCAMfRTT 6.1, the Apache Tomcat application server is now supported, though getting through the installation and instrumentation of it can be a little painful. This article describes some of the gotchas involved.

I recently installed ITCAMfRTT 6.1 and instrumented the Tomcat application server on a Windows 2000 box and came across some gotchas that I wanted to pass along:

1. You CANNOT instrument a Tomcat instance that was installed with the Windows installer (apache-tomcat-x.y.z.EXE). This is because this installer does not put down the main file expected by the ITCAM Tomcat component - catalina.bat. To get this file installed with Tomcat, you must unzip the contents of the apache-tomcat-x.y.z.ZIP file. Using this ZIP file means that you don't get a Windows service definition for Tomcat, so you have to start it manually using ...\bin\startup.bat and ...\bin\shutdown.bat. However, after you instrument Tomcat, you may not be able to start it, which leads us to the next gotcha ...

2. The default install directory for the ITCAM Management Agent (C:\Progra\1\IBM\itcam\RTT\MA) is too long if you're going to deploy the ITCAM Tomcat component to the MA. Specifically, if you accept this default path, when you try to start Tomcat after deploying the ITCAM Tomcat component, you'll get an error stating "The command syntax is incorrect" and "Line too long".