Remote Monitoring Using jconsole

Recently, we made an architectural change to our app which would store the search results in HttpSession for post-sorting options. To test the impact of this additional memory usage by the app, I had to run a load-test with few hundred users who'd perform random searches and their search results would be saved to their sessions. Locally I was easily able to set up jmx monitoring by adding the following to server start script:

@REM JConsole
set JAVA_OPTIONS=%JAVA_OPTIONS% -Dcom.sun.management.jmxremote -Xmanagement

But when I tried to do the same for the cluster (running on unix server) where I was going to perform the load test, I ran into minor hitch as the server was running on secure layer (https). After few tries..and reading a little bit more from sun site about jconsole setup, I got it working. Here's what I had to include in my managed server startup script:

# JMX Remote Monitoring Settings
JMX_PROPERTIES=" -Dcom.sun.management.jmxremote -Dcom.sun.management.jmxremote.port=${JMX_PORT} -Dcom.sun.management.jmxremote.authenticate=false -Dcom.sun.management.jmxremote.ssl=false"
export JMX_PROPERTIES

JMX_PORT - port for each managed server where jconsole should connect for jmx agent.

And on my laptop, I just had to fire of jconsole and enter the following under "Advanced" tab:

service:jmx:rmi:///jndi/rmi://<hostname>:<managed_server_port>/jmxrmi

.. and you are presented with a beautiful sight (or horrendous) based on how well your vm performs. :-)