JMX, SNMP, Java, etc...

A few days ago - I blogged about Tracing JMX - to see what's happening in the MBeanServer, and showed how to dynamically activate the JMX traces in a running Java application. I have taken this example a step further, and wrote a small command line console that uses JMX to let you:

• list known JVMs (VirtualMachine.list())
• attach to a JVM
• switch on/off console output traces in the target JVM
• list existing loggers and their levels in the target JVM
• change logger levels in the target JVM

all of this dynamically from a command-line tool.

For this all I had to do was to write a JMXTracingCLI class - which simply reuses the Activate, JMXTracing, and JMXTracingMBean classes I was using in my example last week. The JMXTracingCLI is a simple command line interpreter that attach to existing VMs and then use JMX to tweak the logging configuration in the target VM. If you create a NetBeans project (named tracing) with all these classes, choose Java SE 6 as Java Platform, add Java SE 6 tools.jar to the project libraries, and choose com.sun.jmx.examples.util.tracing.JMXTracingCLI as Main class for this project, NetBeans will create for you a dist/tracing.jar file that you will be able to execute directly from the java command line.
[Note: you will need Java SE 6 for this, since the getAgentProperties method we use was added to Java SE 6 b65].

For instance this is an example of what it can do:

Start the command line tool

java -jar dist/tracing.jar

The following help is displayed:

 available commands are: 

        attach 
        console [on|off]
        detach [-force:true]
        help {command}*
        level {-jmx|-jmx:remote|patterns}*
        list {-jmx|-jmx:remote|patterns}*
        nohup [on|off]
        quit 
        reload [-force:true]
        switch <-jmx|-jmx:remote|pattern> 
        vmlist 

list the known VMs:

Note: [inputs are in bold, output is regular]

vmlist
22413 [/home/dfuchs/amos/jmx/tracing/dist/tracing.jar]
21646 [org.netbeans.Main --userdir /home/dfuchs/.netbeans/5.0 --branding nb]

I have two Java SE 6 VMs running on my machine: my tracing tool, and my NetBeans IDE [yes, I'm fearlessly using NetBeans with Java SE 6 - all you need to do is to start NetBeans with the appropriate --jdkhome switch].

I'm now going to attach to NetBeans IDE VM. But before I do so, in another terminal I'm going to display NetBeans log file:

tail -f /home/dfuchs/.netbeans/5.0/var/log/messages.log

Then I go back to my JMXTracingCLI and attach to NetBeans VM:

attach 21646
MLet registered: com.sun.jmx.examples.util.tracing:type=MLet
JMXTracing registered: com.sun.jmx.examples.util.tracing:type=JMXTracing
attached to: 21646 - console is off

OK, the tool tells me that console is off. So I'm going to register a new ConsoleHandler in the target VM.

console on
console is on

I want to get swing loggers:

list .*swing.*
javax.swing.BufferStrategyPaintManager
javax.swing.SortingFocusTraversalPolicy

Hummm... Only two. Let's switch them to FINEST

switch .*swing.* FINEST
javax.swing.BufferStrategyPaintManager: FINEST
javax.swing.SortingFocusTraversalPolicy: FINEST
console is on

If now run my mouse over NetBeans, I can see that the swing traces I just activated are dumped in the log:

[tail -f /home/dfuchs/.netbeans/5.0/var/log/messages.log]
Mar 15, 2006 4:15:18 PM javax.swing.BufferStrategyPaintManager beginPaint
FINEST: beginPaint
Mar 15, 2006 4:15:18 PM javax.swing.BufferStrategyPaintManager endPaint
FINEST: endPaint: region 604 114 628 138
Mar 15, 2006 4:15:18 PM javax.swing.BufferStrategyPaintManager beginPaint
FINEST: beginPaint
Mar 15, 2006 4:15:18 PM javax.swing.BufferStrategyPaintManager endPaint
FINEST: endPaint: region 604 114 628 138

This example could be taken even further by e.g. improving the JMXTracingMBean and JMXTracingCLI to make the target VM spit out its traces on a temporary file on e.g. /tmp, instead of simply enabling Console output.
But this gives you a hint of what you can achieve with the power of JMX and Java SE 6 new APIs...