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Monday September 17, 2007

GlassFish V2 management via Java APIs (AMX/JMX)

Managing and monitoring GlassFish programmatically has never been easier than in GlassFish V2, available as of September 17, 2007 [download]. The AMX API provides java interfaces for managing and monitoring the GlassFish application server on the same or remote machine, and even in-process to the server itself (based on JMX). While GlassFish offers an outstanding web-based GUI and command line interface, let’s take a look at what AMX offers for the customer interested in writing a high-performance java-based solution that can be customized to very specific requirements.

Using AMX is easy, but reading some documentation is a good idea. The main AMX page provides links to the documentation including AMX: Design and Use and the Javadoc for the AMX APIs. The sample code is also a great place to start if you want to dive right in and write code.

The GlassFish web-based GUI and command line interfaces perform virtually all of their operations using AMX, so using the AMX APIs has few limitations. Here are just a few of the things you can do using AMX:

• Change existing configuration, including adding to and deleting from existing configuration.
• Create and delete new servers and clusters, and configure all aspects of their operation.
• Efficiently perform bulk queries, for example on a large number of monitoring statistics.
• Listen for “interesting” JMX Notifications such as log messages.
• Query present and past log file history, analyze log file error distribution.
• Determine which servers, applications, servlets, ejbs, web services, etc are available, and monitor them.
• Traverse and inspect the JSR 77 (J2EE Management) hierarchy.
• Read and write dotted names as used in the 'asadmin' command line interface.

Excepting starting the Domain Administration Server or Node Agents processes, the AMX API can do virtually anything you might require with respect to GlassFish management and monitoring. Give it a try today and see if it might simplify your development or production systems by allowing you to create your own streamlined solution.