JBoss JMX and remote monitoring

Java 5 comes with a nice monitoring console, JConsole, which is able to connect localy/remotely to a Java program and tell you basic stuffs about the program. This will require an application to start with a -Dcom.sun.management.jmxremote parameter. How easy! However, this parameter forces the JVM to start an MBeanServer. Well, so far so good, but I tried to use this with JBoss and boom! The JBoss didn't start up successfully. Actually, It was our application that fell apart. Why?

Our application uses Spring to manage its in-container beans. We also use MBeanProxyFactory to get a reference to the MBeans defined within JBoss deployment descriptors. The problem here is that MBeanProxyFactory looks up in the first MBeanServer it finds and ignores the others. It's more likely that this MBeanServer is not the JBoss MBeanServer one when JBoss is started with the monitoring paramter. 

Today I dug up the whole internet for a solution, and it seriously took me a long time to find a solution. First, I started to define a server connection factory but I couldn't find the right service url for the JBoss JMX. The more I tried the less I found :( However, I happened to see a post in spring forums on a similar problem, and it turned out that JBoss has a utility class that gives you access to its MBeanServer. So, the solution for now is to use a base bean for all other proxied mbeans, and set the server:

 

<bean id="baseMBeanProxyFactory" class="org.springframework.jmx.access.MBeanProxyFactoryBean" abstract="true">
    <property name="server">
        <bean class="org.jboss.mx.util.MBeanServerLocator" factory-method="locateJBoss"/>
    </property>
</bean>  

 

This works fine, but it would be easier to specify which MBeanServer should be queried for an MBean lookup. I have requested Spring people to add a new property to the MBeanProxyFactory.

 

ps. For the ones who are still wondering what the JBoss MBeanServer is called, it is 'jboss'.