by Ben Nadel (on Google+)

At work, we use Fusion Reactor to help monitor the health and performance of our ColdFusion J2EE applications. When certain application metrics reach a given threshold, Fusion Reactor sends out an Email Alert with a massive amount of data including a full stack-trace and a list of all the running requests.

This email alert has been invaluable and I thank my lucky stars that such a product even exists! But, I think it could be better; or rather, there are ways that it could be made more readable. And, to start playing around with some of these ideas, I thought a great first step would be to parse the raw email content into a usable data structure.

The FusionReactorAlert.cfc is a ColdFusion component that takes the raw email content and provides methods for accessing the running requests, threads, CFThreads, and an aggregate report of all the data in structured format. Once instantiated, the ColdFusion component provides the following public methods:

• getColdFusionThreads() :: array
• getJavaThreads() :: array
• getReport() :: struct
• getRunningRequests() :: array

The "report" is a structure that contains two ColdFusion query objects:

• runningRequests
• coldfusionThreads

By default, the running-requests query is ordered by request duration (DESC); however, since it's a ColdFusion query, you can run your own query-of-queries to order it as you see fit. The running-requests query also contains a query column, "thread" that embeds the Java thread directly in the request record.

After building the ColdFusion version of the Fusion Reactor Alert, I tried to re-create it using JavaScript so that I could build a client-only, online viewer. Now, you can pull up the online viewer and just copy-paste your Fusion Reactor Alert email and quickly see your report:

I put this together in a few hours, so it probably has all kinds of bugs; but it works with the sample data.

The parsing in this ColdFusion component is based on the way that GMail reports the "original" email content. I am not sure if this "original" data is consistent across various email clients; or, if this is just how you can expect it in a GMail context.

Furthermore, I built this using Fusion Reactor alerts from a single ColdFusion application; as such, I am sure there is going to be variation in formatting that I have not accounted for.