Introduction

What is Flopsar®

Flopsar is a Fault Detection and Diagnosis software for Java systems developed by Flopsar Technology. Its main goal is to detect errors and problems in your Java systems and help to find the root cause quickly.

What is the most important thing in systems maintenance? Systems maintenance relies on making the systems highly available and responsive. This implies that we must maintain the number of outages as low as possible and the time needed to resolve any issues must be as short as possible. However, if the worst happens and the system fails, besides the fact it failed we need to know why. Knowing why is not sufficient if finding the cause can take a whole day or even longer. These are the main problems that need to be addressed.

Unlike other APM-like tools, Flopsar does not require users to predict what may go wrong in their systems. Moreover, we do not lose information about your applications processing by probing or collecting only some vague averages and aggregated data. Flopsar is a highly customizable and extensible product. It is framework and application servers agnostic and all it needs is just JVM.

Flopsar has more key features that help users to maintain their systems better. Its area of application is not only limited to systems maintenance, it is also used in applications development processes successfully. Its features can be extended by using plugins, which allow users to perform extra processing at runtime, with no application source code changes.

Versioning

Every version label is composed of three numbers X.Y.Z:

X Major version number: major changes, e.g. architecture change.

Y Minor version number: minor changes, e.g. new features.

Z Small version number: bugs fixes.

note

Versions X.Y are equivalent to X.Y.0

Do not mix binaries form different releases, since they are not compatible. You can mix only those components, which have the same both major and minor release numbers.

caution

Incompatible components are unable to work together. Any connection between two incompatible components is dropped.

Licensing

Flopsar is proprietary software and you need a valid license to run it. The license is a license.key file, which should be obtained separately. There are some restrictions on the Flopsar usage depending on the license type you purchased.

info

Flopsar Lite does not require any license to run.

You can always display information about your license by executing the command:

$ flopsar info --license license.key

Supported Platforms and Requirements

Agent

AGENT FILE	SUPPORTED JVM VERSION
flopsar-agent-N.jar	1.6
flopsar-agent-N.jar	1.7
flopsar-agent-N.jar	1.8
flopsar-agent-N-jvm9.jar	9
flopsar-agent-N-jvm9.jar	10
flopsar-agent-N-jvm9.jar	11

info

The agent is framework and application servers agnostic, so no detailed list of supported environments is needed.

Workstation

Workstation requires JVM 1.8u131+. It can be run only on those platforms which are supported by JavaFX.

caution

Workstation does not support JVM 9+.

Flopsar Server

Flopsar Server supports only 64 bit GNU/Linux systems with the kernel at least 2.6.33.

Release Notes

Flopsar 3.0 is a brand new release. It has been redesigned from the ground up. No migration mechanism from the older Flopsar version is available.

Flopsar Lite

Flopsar Lite is free of charge version of the Flopsar software. It does not require the license file to run. The lite version has the same features as the paid one, however with some limitations.

• It can be run only in the standalone mode.
• It purges all the collected data every three hours.
• It supports only a single Agent and a single Workstation client.

info

The difference between the lite and standard versions lies only in the server component. The remaining components stay the same for both versions.

You can either install the server package on your own machine or use a Docker image.