BPM Certification

I've been invited by a friend to take the new OMG's OCEB certification beta test exam. This new certification is exciting for BPM professionals all around the world. It'll set a baseline for every BPM professional. The exam's contents are challenging, from business objetives of process improvements, to the BPMN modelling notation and some process improvement frameworks such as APQC.

New performance tool for IBM JVM

(Un)Fortunately I have to work with a IBM Java environment (PPC64 hardware), and I have to say that the big blue provides several tools to diagnose problems. One of those tools is the Java Lock Analyzer. It allows a developer to detect and diagnose lock and monitor problems such as deadlocks or unnecessary wait states.
BTW, it only works with IBM JVMs AFAIK.
Hope it helps.

As real time as you can get

The people from Orbitz (the popular travel site) open sourced their real time monitoring application called Graphite.

It uses an specialized database to store the time series data. This allows to quickly retrieve the monitoring information. Other approaches like storing directly to a SQL database are slower because of the engine´s overhead.

Graphite has a very slick and elegant UI to browse the monitored metrics and a CLI for faster administration.

I´m currently using Zabbix at the office, but it needs lots of maintainance from the operations people and has some glitches when it comes to gather the metrics. It also interpolates data when it's inexistent. A critical flaw for a monitoring application. We are planning to replace it with another tool ASAP.

Documental increible sobre los tiempos que vivimos