In the cloud world (which we've entered recently), most of the new applications are running in virtualized environments that are sold as services themselves (IAAS, PAAS).

This implies that a lot of responsibilities (infrastructure, network, OS, filesystem, and so on) are now out of our hands, which is good. But when we need to understand why our application has crashed or why it is particularly slow, we should be able to get our hands back on some of the responsibilities. For instance, our application might be slower at some point because the host network is overloaded or because the file system is being archived and is reducing the IO's performance.

Those facts have increased the need for monitoring, and this need has been tackled by great teams, building great products; New Relic (http://newrelic.com/) is one of them and probably the most famous one as well.

Actually, the Typesafe team is part of those smart teams, and so it has recently created a brand-new product called the Typesafe Console. We'll take the opportunity to introduce this product in this section, but first of all, let me warn you of some things. This is a paid product; at the time of writing, however, it has been announced that it will soon be free for developers.

Furthermore, this console is not yet ready to monitor a whole Play! Framework 2 application. Indeed, its first goal is to monitor the Akka systems; nevertheless, this feature should come in the future.

So far, so good, but what's that console?

The Typesafe Console is a web application built upon the Typesafe stack 2, and thus it uses Scala, Akka 2, and Play! Framework 2. But it also uses MongoDB to store information about the metrics gathered from the running/monitored instances. As this section is a short introduction to this product, we won't dive into too many details, but we'll have a quick overview of its features.

The Typesafe Console is meant to monitor and trace the deployed event-based systems using Akka. By capturing these events, it is able to compute metrics on them and to present them in a neat, clean, and beautiful web interface. And so, no matter whether our application is deployed on several nodes or using the remote capabilities of Akka, the console remains the single monitoring point.

See the next screenshot to know what the console looks like and what it can display. If you want to see it in real life, you can, of course, download it and try it, or you can also go to http://console-demo.typesafe.com/:

In the preceding screenshot, we see that we can monitor several nodes (two in this case) and the system itself (with some filters enabled on the top right).

From here, a lot of views are available because almost everything is clickable, which results in a different view (scoped). For instance, one could see the status of the dispatcher of the second node:

Or even see the workload of a particular actor (a piece of work):

Having that for Play! Framework 2's internals (requests, accesses, and so on) will be awesome!