Luis-Miguel Alventosa's Blog

Mimicking the out-of-the-box JMX management agent in J2SE 5.0

Starting with J2SE 5.0, the JVM is instrumented for monitoring and management providing built-in ("out-of-the-box") management capabilities for both remote and local access. The JVM includes a platform MBean server and platform MBeans that JMX management applications can use. You can also instrument and monitor your own applications by adding your application specific MBeans to the platform MBean server.

By default, remote access to the out-of-the-box management agent is protected by authentication (password files), authorization (access files) and SSL/TLS encryption. All the out-of-the-box management agent configuration is performed through system properties and/or through a management.properties file (located under JRE_HOME/lib/management/management.properties). For more detailed info about the Monitoring and Management APIs in the Java platform have a look at the Monitoring and Management Guide.

In most of the cases using the out-of-the-box management agent and configuring it through the management.properties file is enough but there are some cases such as when exporting the RMI server remote objects in a given port to allow firewall traversing, or exporting the RMI server remote objects using a specific network interface in multi-homed systems, etc, where it may not be enough. For such cases we can mimic the behavior of the out-of-the-box management agent by directly using the JMX Remote API to programmatically create, configure and deploy the management agent.

[Read More] Posted by lmalvent ( Jun 02 2006, 05:50:16 PM CEST ) Permalink Comments [3]