JMX "Dashboard" App

Question

I have been playing around with JMX for the last few days and although I don't mind JConsole or the standard JMX web admin tool, it would be nice to create my own web app that somehow queried the registered JMX MBeans and presented a nice, rich-UI-style "dashboard" with charts and graphs; things that the JMX console or JConsole simply do not have.

Is this possible? I've heard of something called a JMX "agent" but not sure if that has anything to do with how JMX can be queried and managed by a dashboard-style app. Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

HawtIO Is about the best plug-and-play, works out of the box solution for getting JMX stuff on a web page. You can put multiple mbeans on the same page and see them all at once, it works in a browser, you don't have to write a bunch of front-end code yourself, and it can be done without opening up weird ports that your IT department will get nervous about. The data visualization options that work with the simple drag and drop interface are pretty minimal, but there is documentation for writing more advanced plugins.

The backend uses Jolokia to put an HTTP REST interface on JMX, which is probably going to be true for any solution you might look at.

Answer 2

One of the comments here is that VisualVM is a profiler. VisualVM isn't a profiler, it's a platform built on top of the NetBeans platform. The platform supports connecting to a VM in flight a number ways including using a JMXConnector to the MBeanPlatformServer, Serviceability Agent (SA), Attach on demand and so on.

VisualVM does contain 2 different profilers but there is also an MBean plugin that allows you to view and manipulate MBeans that have been registered with the MBeansPlatformServer.

A number of the view in VisualVM scrape data from the MXBeans found in the java.lang.management package that are registered with the MBeansPlatformServer. Many of these MXBeans are wrappers over the SA, a component of HotSpot that maintains a set of performance counters. For example, counters can give you some information about JIT compiler activity, GC activity and even host platform CPU utilization and so on.

You can easily build your own plugins to view or manipulate MBeans. The tutorial mentioned in a posting here is one source of information as to how to get it done. I have written a demonstration VisualVM plugin that looks at data from the MemoryPool MXBeans. That plugin has been augmented by others to do a number of other things. All the code can be found at java.net in the project MemoryPoolView. It covers reading data. However executing functionality is really just executing a method against the JMXConnector with the parameters required by the MBean you are interacting with. IOWs, it's a fairly trivial extension of the plugin.

Answer 3

Jolokia is an agent based approach to JMX which translates JMX native calls to JSON-over-HTTP. It comes with a Javascript library which is perfectly suited for used within the browser. For a sample usage within a web page look at the demo of the Jolokia-Cubism Integration or even better have a look at the blog post from Tomasz Nurkiewicz which gives a very nice example of using Jolokia along with the Highcharts graphing library.

Said all this, there is even more: Ají, Jolokia's fancy sister, has been started as project which will provide an JMX console bundled along with Jolokia clients. I'm still sorting things outs (well, it moves slowly ...), but I think that over the summer more will be there. One can already play around with it and we still look for volunteers (hint ;-) ....

Answer 4

What you are looking to do has probably already been built unless you really want to do it yourself. Have you looked at VisualVM before? I really like it http://visualvm.java.net/mbeans_tab.html/

To write your own application that manages MBeans remotely I think you could start with this tutorial. Seems to be a good starting point.

http://docs.oracle.com/javase/tutorial/jmx/remote/custom.html