It is all about JMX

It is all about JMX

I worked on JMX stuff on OC4J lately, and found information are scattered at many places. Thought of writing blog to combine information which might be useful.

- Simple MBean registered in Stand-Alone JVM, and monitered using JConsole

- Simple MBean registration to stand-alone OC4J, Stand-Alone OC4J MBean Browser, Stand-Alone OC4J MBean Client

- Simple MBean registration to cluster OC4J, OC4J Cluster MBean Browser, Cluster OC4J MBean Client

- Monitor OC4J MBeans using JConsole

1. Stand-Alone JVM

As per MBean spec, we need to define interface which is suffixed by MBean. I created interface called HelloServiceMBean and implemented called HelloService.

Here getMessage and setMessage will expose my message as an attribute to the MBean and printMessage will be exposed as an operation to MBean. To register this MBean in stand-alone JVM, I wrote another class which register this MBean in JVM and I could manage it using JConsole MBean Browser.

I compiled those classes using JDeveloper and executed through following command line:

cd D:projectsJMXSamplesSampleJMXclasses

java -Dcom.sun.management.jmxremote jmx.trial.SimpleAgent

On second window, I started JConsole using: %JAVA_HOME%jdkbinJConsole, and I can see my MBean with Attributes and Operations. I can invoke any operation but I am not able to change any attribute using JConsole. Not sure why I am not able to change any attribute value using JConsole, it works just fine with OC4J MBean Browser.

2. MBean with Stand-Alone OC4J

There are two options we can try, Registering JAR (static registration) file to OC4J using deployment descriptor, and registering MBean from servlet (dyanmic registration). For current Blog entry, I will use deploying through descriptor.

I used the same project which I used for Stand-Alone JVM. I created 3 artifacts in my JDeveloper project:

- Created EJB-JAR deployment profile for jar file called: helloservicejar.deploy

- Created EAR deployment profile: helloservice.deploy (had dependency on helloservicejar.deploy)

- Created OC4J deployment descriptor called - orien-application.xml

I deployed this ear file in stand-alone OC4J, I can see my application and MBean Browser right in EM console. (We can also register this Jar file in j2ee/config/application.xml file then we don't need to have orien-application.xml and ear file.)

Here I can change attribute values and invoke operation without any issues. I used java client to test MBeans deployed on OC4J.

Here getMBeanConnection method is pretty generic, it will get us connection based on the URL specified. printAllMBeans will iterate through all available MBeans and prints all MBeans. The testStandAlone() method does, invocation of method, get attribute and set attribute.

I had to put following libraries in my classpath in order to execute my client:

J2EE
j2eehomelibjmx_remote_api.jar
j2eehomelibjmxcluster.jar
j2eehomelibjmxri.jar
j2eehomelibadminclient.jar
j2eehomeoc4jclient.jar
opmnlib all six jar files.

3. MBean with Cluster OC4J

Registration as JAR: Registration through JAR in Cluster is pretty much similar as registering in Stand-Alone. I use JDeveloper to deploy my EAR file in Cluster Group. I created a group called default_group and registered all my OC4J instances in that group.

Dynamic Registration: Through servlet or POJO residing in container, I could register only to specific container. It looks like, all instances has to do the same to achieve cluster level MBeans deployment.

For testing purpose, I manually deployed a JAR on OC4J group. Here is little introduction about Cluster MBean:

Cluster MBean is actually a proxy to the OC4J group. Client (Java/Browser) can get hold on Cluster MBean, and pass the specific MBean and it's method/attribute as paraemter. Cluster MBean takes care of invoking those method across cluster. Cluster MBean knows about all OC4J instances through OC4J group configured in EM. For each OC4J group there will be one Cluster MBean proxy.

OC4J Cluster MBean Browser: following are the screen shots which explains how did I use cluster MBean browser for getAttribute, I can use it for setAttribute or invoke operation exactly the same way.

Upon invoking the operation I get following return values.

Now to test through Java code, it is pretty much the same concept:

We can see that I got access to Cluster MBean which is "ias:j2eeType=J2EEServerGroup,name=default_group', and after that I am just invoking method of that proxy same as MBean browser. Here tricky part is method signatures, OC4J MBean browser is able to know all those signature through reflection but in my code I had to provide those signature before hand.

4. Monitor OC4J MBeans using JConsole

Basically by adding few libraries to JConsole, you can use it to browse OC4J MBeans. Here is the thing I used to start my JConsole:

set ORACLE_HOME=d:soasuite

jconsole -J-Dcom.sun.management.jmxremote.ssl=false -J-Dcom.sun.management.jmxremote.authenticate=true -J-Djmx.remote.protocol.provider.pkgs=oracle.oc4j.admin.jmx.remote -J-Djava.class.path=;%JAVA_HOME%libjconsole.jar;%JAVA_HOME%libtools.jar;%ORACLE_HOME%j2eehomelibadminclient.jar;%ORACLE_HOME%j2eehomeoc4jclient.jar;%ORACLE_HOME%j2eehomelibjavax77.jar

Upon the window, I added the same URLs which I used in my Java program, I can use any of the following URLs:

STAND_ALONE_OC4J_URL (service:jmx:rmi://localhost:23791/oc4j)
SOASUITE_HOME_URL (service:jmx:rmi:///opmn://mycomputer:6003/home)
SOASUITE_OC4J_SOA_URL (service:jmx:rmi:///opmn://mycomputer:6003/oc4j_soa)
SOASUITE_CLUSTER_URL (service:jmx:rmi:///opmn://localhost:6003/cluster)

And it works great except one weird exception on DOS prompt.

Source code for all can be downloaded over here.