If you’re ever facing troubleshooting problems, in any version of CF, FusionReactor is a great tool to help. And to help you consider it and get started, note that I did a free 4-part webinar series on “Troubleshooting with FusionReactor”.

You can find them (and fuller descriptions of each) at the FR webinars page, which then points  to the youtube video for each webinar recording:

• Troubleshooting with FR, part 1: What has just happened on my server? (video)
• Troubleshooting with FR, part 2: Why are requests/transactions running slowly? (video)
• Troubleshooting with FR, part 3: When requests are slow for less obvious reasons (video)
• Troubleshooting with FR, part 4: Post-crash troubleshooting (video)

While FR is indeed a third-party commercial product (though low-cost, and with a free 14-day trial), it really has proven to be a great solution for CF users for nearly 15 years. And it’s ever-evolving, of course, and the webinars cover both classic features and some of the newer capabilities (like the Archive Viewer added in 7.2, and the request/cpu/memory profiling added in its Ultimate edition).

Each webinar is about an hour, and the 4 parts really help one new to FR (or even longtime users) appreciate how to use its tools and techniques to solve problems, whether using CF or Lucee or indeed any Java app server.

What about the CF2018 Performance Management Toolset (PMT)?

Some may know that CF2018 added the PMT, which provides much the same sort of diagnostic and troubleshooting tool (which works only with CF2018). To be clear, I’m not offering this info in contradiction to that.

First, I have mentioned the PMT and pointed to resources for learning more here and elsewhere, most recently in part 3 of my series here on CF2018 hidden gems, as well as last year in a blog post I did on my site when CF2018 and the PMT were released.

Second, I do plan to do some more here on the PMT, whether in the form of blog posts or videos, to help folks get started with and leverage it, for their CF2018 servers.

That said, I will say that one could run both the PMT and FR on a single CF2018 instance, if they wanted to, as the tools compliment (but do not conflict with) each other. Each has things the other does not, while both share many things in common.

Indeed, I would argue that one interested in using the PMT only might still get a lot out of the videos in terms of the troubleshooting diagnostics and approaches that I share, which can be found and applied in a very similar way in the PMT.

What about the future for FR?

Finally, some may wonder, “what is the future of FR, now that CF2018 has the PMT?”. To that I would say that the future is indeed promising.

First, recall that FR can monitor far more than just CF (including Lucee and other previous alternative CFML engines like Railo, BlueDragonJX, and Open BlueDragon). FR can also be used with any Java app server (Tomcat, WildFly, WebSphere, and so on).

By the way, FR can also be used to monitor any of the various java-based service that CF implements, including the Add-on Service (Solr, PDFG), the API Manager, and even the PMT itself! 🙂

And there are features FusionReactor has that the PMT does not (such as the new Event Snapshot feature in FR 8, and more). I’d like to do a comparison of them at some point to help folks in assessing them.

And I would point also that FusionReactor is more than “just a monitor”. It provides so many features for troubleshooting and tuning that indeed those 4 webinars just scratch the surface, though they do give you all you need to solve most server problems immediately. But FR can also help you improve web app performance in many ways. See another dozen webinars alongside those, which dive into such problems and often simple solutions.

And the team behind FR are working daily to improve the product and help you keep your servers running great. Check out the webinars, as well as other learning and support resources at the FR site.

For more blog content from Charlie Arehart, see his posts here as well as his posts at carehart.org. And follow him on Twitter and other social media as carehart.