A lot of server software runs on Java, but the different Java processes are listed as simply Java via commands like top or ps -ef. One feature of the Stackify agent is tracking the running processes on a server. I needed a way to identify what each Java process really was in a fairly simple and concise way, but there isn’t a clear winner in the output of the top or ps commands.
A good Linux init script that works across multiple distros is hard to find. Most distros have a sample/skeleton init script to base your own init scripts on, but that requires having a separate init script for each distro. For the Stackify Linux agent I wanted to have a single init script that would work on all common Linux distros. I had a decent init script that worked pretty well for ‘start’ and ‘stop’ commands, but not so much for ‘status’. The ‘status’ command worked on my development machine (Ubuntu) but didn’t work on the other distros I was testing on (CentOS/Redhat/Amazon).