JMX Monitoring

One of the features Java Management Extensions provides is the ability to add instrumentation to an application. While this makes collecting metrics straightforward, it doesn’t address storage for these metrics. Enter David Dossot’s JMX Monitoring Scout Plugin.

David has used the plugin to monitor an asynchronous data archiver designed to efficiently store huge volumes of data produced by smart meters. David monitors the following metrics:

By default, the JMX Monitoring plugin collects heap and non-heap memory usage metrics. However, you can easily modify the plugin settings to report your own custom metrics:

Installing the plugin

Like all Scout plugins, installing the JMX plugin is just a couple of mouse clicks away. Just click the add plugin button in the Scout UI and select the JMX Monitoring plugin. Note that the plugin has one dependency: Jmxterm must be installed.

About the plugin author

David is an independent software contractor, primarily developing back-end systems for the JVM and the Erlang VM. He uses a hodgepodge of languages and technologies that include Java, Groovy, Erlang/OTP, Ruby, (a little) C#, RabbitMQ, ActiveMQ, Redis, PostgreSQL and Mule.

Deployment in the cloud (EC2/Rackspace) is the norm for most of his clients. Before using Scout, David used Zabbix extensively. He recently switch to Scout because of its ease of installation, customization and convenience (no need to backup nor monitor the monitoring platform!).