This is an updated blog of the original which was published in May 2016

Payara Server provides the Health Check Service for automatic self-monitoring in order to detect future problems as soon as possible. When enabled, the Health Check Service periodically checks some low level metrics. Whenever it detects that a threshold is not met, it triggers alert notifications that allow to detect undesired behavior and predict possible failures. All of these automatic checks are very lightweight and run with a negligible impact on performance.

The HealthCheck Service provides automatic self-monitoring in order to detect future problems as soon as possible. The HealthCheck Service was introduced in Payara Server and Payara Micro version 161 and some new metrics have been added in version 162.

All the functionality of the HealthCheck Service that is available in Payara Server is also included in Payara Micro. However, as Payara Micro differs in some concepts from Payara Server, the usage and configuration of the HealthCheck Service is slightly different. In this post, we will focus on how to use it in Payara Micro.

One of the most exciting new features in the Payara Server 162 release is the Asadmin Recorder - a tool especially useful for the Operations Teams! 

Asadmin Recorder allows you to create runnable scripts of asadmin commands that mirror configuration done in the administration console.  Have a look at our video walkthrough below for a quick overview of this new Payara Server feature.

Once you have developed applications on Payara Server and moved these applications into a production environment, control will pass over to your Operations Teams. This guide will introduce some features of Payara Server that you may not know about, which are especially useful for the operations teams.

Taking an environment from development through to production is often an afterthought and can all too often be too far down the list of priorities. Initially, there may not be any obvious problems or issues with manually configuring a new production environment to match an existing one in development or test. As some customers I have visited have found, however, this will only lead to bigger and bigger inconsistency between platforms with ad-hoc changes causing different environments to diverge.

Of course, as responsible developers, we all thoroughly test our code and therefore our applications never need troubleshooting; it's everyone else's code that goes wrong.

So what do we do when the inevitable happens?

One of the lesser known features and key benefits of Payara Server is that it provides huge flexibility when architecting topologies for High Availability and Scalability. Utilising the embedded Hazelcast Data Grid for web session and JCache clustering brings the potential of many different topologies for scale out.

When we founded Payara and started development on Payara Server, one of our key goals was to make Payara Server the best application server for production work loads. Operations Teams will be happy to hear that the February 161 release adds Slow SQL Logging and in-built Server HealthChecks as new capabilities for managing production workloads!