Last week our team announced the release of the long-awaited JBoss Operations Network (JBoss ON) 2.0 at JavaOne in San Francisco. This release was several years in the making and is not only noteworthy for its new features, but also because it demonstrates our commitment to deliver tangible milestones within the JBoss Enterprise Acceleration initiative.

JBoss ON is all about increasing the reliability and visibility into applications deployed on JBoss Enterprise Application Platform (EAP). Among the new features are enhanced configuration editing and auditing, enhanced application discovery and deployment and an advanced query-based grouping system called DynaGroups. JBoss ON is now capable of scaling to much larger environments while still collecting a rich model of infrastructure performance. Rich exposure of everything from VM statistics to Hibernate details provides easy access to critical data in one place. The new grouping and security capabilities also greatly simplify the use of the security model to allow just the right levels of access to even the most complex environment. These features are designed to make it easier to know what is going on in your applications and to keep them running smoothly in mission-critical environments.

Customers are getting more sophisticated within IT Operations with respect to middleware management and are looking for specialized tools to help manage the application life cycle. JBoss ON is designed to improve efficiency for IT operations staff while reducing the TCO of managing JBoss Middleware. The consistency of application deployments and configurations from a central location throughout an enterprise results in a more secure environment, better performance & adherence to compliance requirements. As an added benefit, the monitoring solution provides health & diagnostic data to improve operational performance.

Equally as exciting is that for the first time, JBoss ON is based on an open source project called RHQ – we started talking about RHQ at JBoss World Orlando. The project aims to deliver the core management capabilities of JBoss ON in a platform model. Plugins developed for RHQ can be used with JBoss ON and will serve as a reliable platform for extending JBoss ON and further integrating JBoss projects into production systems. We’ve licensed the code, under the GPL open source license and project information and community forums are accessible at www.rhq-project.org. We’d love to have more contributors join the project so be sure to check it out.

Finally, we’ll be hosting a JBoss ON webinar on Thursday, May 15th at 4:00pm ET where you can watch a demonstration and have any questions answered in person. We’ll be focusing on the new capabilities for administration, deployment management, and monitoring of JBoss Middleware. Click here to register for the webinar. JavaOne was a really exciting event for us, check out more of our team’s blog about the event.