JMX console

One of the main benfits of JMX is the ability to "see" what happens at runtime and to tune the process. The admin interface is good, as it provides a nice interface - but for advanced use you need a low level console. Each JMX tool has its own console - and that may be a bit confusing if you switch them often.



An interesting fact is that most of the consoles can be used with other JMX implementations - with almost no effort. That's a pretty good proof of the benefits of low coupling.



The JBoss console is a webapp - you'll need to copy jboss-client.jar and log4j.jar in WEB-INF/lib, since it's not self-contained ( there are few utils for logging ), but besides that you should be able to use it with any servlet container that has JMX support. It may be worth precompiling the jsps.



MX4J doesn't depend on a servlet container - it uses an interesting ( but slower ) XSL and its own HTTP listener. All you need to do is load the mbeans. Commons-moder provides a one-line mechanism - I'll comment on it later ( I'll do few more enhancements and simplifications ).



JMX-RI has the fastest console - also contain its own HTTP listener and is packed as few mbeans. I have no idea what's inside - so I usually preffer one of the other two.



Another note - in tomcat ( any - if it uses jk2 and coyote ) you can just add a "mx.port=PORT" in jk2.properties and MX4J or JMX-RI console will be started. You need to copy one of the 2 in server/lib ( mx4j-tools.jar or jmxri-tools.jar ). If mx4j is used, it'll also try to enable the RMI connector. Most of the code will fail gracefully, without affecting the rest. The startup time overhead is quite small.