Note: This blog post is from 2012. Some content may be outdated--though not necessarily. Same with links and subsequent comments from myself or others. Corrections are welcome, in the comments. And I may revise the content as necessary.

With a title like Beginner's Guide, one may wonder what to expect. As a contributor myself to several CF books (carehart.org/contact.cfm#books), I appreciate the challenge in deciding the intended audience for a book, and keeping it in mind as we are writing. And having been a co-contributor on now 10 multi-author books (not all on CF), I appreciate the challenge in keeping a consistent voice among all those authors throughout a book, as well as each keeping that intended audience front and center. It's not easy, although it can be aided greatly by careful editorial control and editing.

What to expect from the book?

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Note: This blog post is from 2012. Some content may be outdated--though not necessarily. Same with links and subsequent comments from myself or others. Corrections are welcome, in the comments. And I may revise the content as necessary.

You can find the recording here. Note that you need to login with an Adobe ID, just like when you download Adobe software or participate in their forums. (I have no control over that.)

Since that link just goes right to the recording, here is the description I'd used for the session, to help decide if the recording may interest you. BTW, I clarify on the session that FR is useful for more than just ColdFusion, in that FusionReactor can be used for Railo, BlueDragon, and OpenBlueDragon, as well as in fact any Java server (Tomcat, JBoss, Jetty, Glassfish, Websphere, etc.), and the session applies just as well to folks using those.

My session: Monitoring ColdFusion with FusionReactor

Recording
Session Description:

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Note: This blog post is from 2012. Some content may be outdated--though not necessarily. Same with links and subsequent comments from myself or others. Corrections are welcome, in the comments. And I may revise the content as necessary.

Yet people will reasonably want to be able to have some mechanism that "watches" CF "from the outside", to know when it's gone down. How can you do that? That's what I'll point out in this entry.

And beyond talking about what goes along with the CF Enterprise Server Monitor, I'll also point out options for those who are NOT running CF 8, 9, or 10 Enterprise and therefore do not have the Enterprise Server Monitor. This also includes those CF 6 or 7. There are solutions for you, and also for those running Lucee, Railo, BD, or indeed any Java server. More on all that in a moment.

This is part 4 of an unexpected series of entries today on the CF Enterprise Server Monitor. :-) I got on a roll, and each seemed deserving of its own topic. See the "Related Blog Entries" below this entry for links to those.

What the CF Server Monitor is, and is not

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Note: This blog post is from 2012. Some content may be outdated--though not necessarily. Same with links and subsequent comments from myself or others. Corrections are welcome, in the comments. And I may revise the content as necessary.

BTW, today is "more about the CF Server Monitor" day today here at carehart.org. :-) In my last two entries today, I talked about related matters, regarding the impact of the 3 "start" buttons (monitoring, profiling, and memory tracking), as a followup to an older entry I did on them when the monitor came out with CF 8 in 2007. See the "related blog entries" below for more.

In the last entry, I mentioned that in 9.0.1, Adobe added a new "Monitoring Settings" page to the CF Admin, and one of the features is that ability I discussed to turn off the 3 start buttons from within the Admin.

Below that is this other feature, labeled "Enable Monitoring Server". Let me say first that has really have nothing to do with all the discussion of the "start" buttons in the previous entries.

So what does "Enabling Monitor Server" do?

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Note: This blog post is from 2012. Some content may be outdated--though not necessarily. Same with links and subsequent comments from myself or others. Corrections are welcome, in the comments. And I may revise the content as necessary.

But the CF Server Monitor does have an Achilles Heel: you may turn on one of its "start" buttons, especially "memory tracking", and find that it's crippling your server. You may not be able to then turn off the feature.

I talked about this potential issue in an entry when CF 8 was released back in 2007, CF Server Monitor: what's the impact on production? you may be surprised. I clarify there that the monitor will not, as some assert, "always kill your server". See that for more details.

And I discussed in an entry earlier today that you can't just "close the monitor" or even restart CF to make the problem go away, because that won't stop the functionality. See CF911: Using the #ColdFusion Server Monitor? Be aware that the "Start" buttons remain enabled.

So what if you are in a situation where using one of the features, especially typically "memory tracking", has in fact sent your server into a tizzy. If you can't even get into the monitor to turn it off, you're going to be in quite a pickle, and understandably panicked.

Easy solution if you're on CF 9.0.1

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Note: This blog post is from 2012. Some content may be outdated--though not necessarily. Same with links and subsequent comments from myself or others. Corrections are welcome, in the comments. And I may revise the content as necessary.

Why is this important? Well, I discussed the impact of these buttons (which can be severe or negligible, depending on certain factors) in a blog entry I wrote back in 2007 when CF8 was released.

And today someone was kind enough to point it out to someone on Twitter, so I took a look at it and tweaked it a bit to give some more context. While doing that, I realized I'd never mentioned this fact about the "start" buttons, and about an important related change in CF 9.01 (and 10), thus this entry.

The buttons remain enabled over CF restart or closing the monitor

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