Question

I want to use Spring Insight with Tomcat 6. I cant use TC server because of reasons beyond my control. So I am looking at integrating Spring Insight with Tomcat 6. Has any one worked on this before or can any one point me to any documentation.

Thanks,
Anuj

Answer 1

Insight Developer (the free product) comes in two form, packaged with tc Server Developer and packaged with STS. Neither option will provide an easy mechanism for installing Insight into Tomcat. I’m not saying that it can’t be done, there is just no simple way to do it.

If you really want to run Insight on Tomcat then you are going to need to do some work. Here are the rough steps that you’ll need to do.

1. Download vFabric tc Server Developer
2. Create a vFabric tc Server instance which has Insight enabled.
3. Download the latest Apache Tomcat 6.0.x or 7.0.x

4. Copy the following files & folders from the tc Server instance w/Insight

   • bin/setenv.sh
   • bin/insight-bootstrap-tcserver-1.8.3.RELEASE.jar
   • insight
   • lib/*
   • webapps/insight.war

5. Edit conf/server.xml and add the following Valve to the Engine block.

   <Valve className="com.springsource.insight.collection.tcserver.request.HttpRequestOperationCollectionValve"/>

6. Edit conf/context.xml and add the following before the closing Context tag.

   <Loader loaderClass="com.springsource.insight.collection.tcserver.ltw.TomcatWeavingInsightClassLoader" />

   <Listener className="com.springsource.insight.collection.tcserver.lifecycle.ApplicationLifecycleCollectionListener" />

7. Start the Tomcat instance.

Alternatively, Insight Operations (a paid product) makes this much easier and offers an installer that allows you to easily and quickly add the Insight Agent into different containers, including ASF Tomcat. Here’s a link to the documentation.

http://pubs.vmware.com/vfabric51/topic/com.vmware.vfabric.tc-server.2.7/operations/install-agents.html