JMX and JBOSS

[Dan Grindstaff]

Hello, I am doing some brainstorming to put together a plug-in for JBOSS Operations Network that will monitor a websphere application instance. Please forgive me if this is not the right forum for this question. JON uses 'agents' to discover and monitor JBOSS instances. What I want to do is develop an agent that specifically montiors a websphere instance. I know that the agent is expecting information in the JMX format, specifically, JMX statistics. What I am hoping to accomplish here is to determine how to implement a JMX 'conversation' between a JON agent and a websphere instance. Once I have this information I can then write code to monitor and hopefully manage some aspects of the websphere AS. Please give feedback. TIA.

[Peter Johnson]

There are two parts to a JON agent:
1) the front end which communicates with JON. You will want to keep this the same even when monitoring websphere
2) the back end which gathers the data to be sent to JON. This you will need to change to gather the required data from websphere. First, you will have to find out how websphere provides the desired information. That might be via JMX or some other mechanism. Then you will need to know how to write code to gather that data.

I think that you are really asking about part #2. For this, you will have to ask in the websphere forum. I'll move this topic (actually, the topic will appear in both locations).

[Dan Grindstaff]

Thanks for the reply! I have found some example code at http://itdevworld.wordpress.com/2009/02/01/monitoring-a-secured-websphere-installation-through-joprrhq/. I am wondering if I can get away with replacing the code JMXServerComponent as directed by the example and create another class, WebsphereConnectionProvider, to hold the code from the example class of the same name.

[Dan Grindstaff]

Hello, I have completed the java files for the agent but I notice that the files reference several jars I do not have. Assuming I can get my hands on these (mostly) mc4j libraries, should I include them in the overall jar? As far as I know it is not possible to jar a jar. TIA.

[Paul Clapham]

No, as you suspected jar-in-jar isn't the way to go. Just collect up all the jars you need and make sure they are in the classpath.