JConsole and VisualVM have made it very simple to access MBeans in a remote target VM. There's also a lot of blogs and documents that explain how to access remote MBeans programmatically. But how do you access local MBeans registered in your own JVM?

I recently created an integration with SunGrid Engine. This was easy to do - requiring only that a listener be written that hears JMX events that are produced by our product. As you may know, with GigaSpaces you can create watches for the services you deploy. These watches are populated with information coming from getter methods on those services.

Run-time performance monitoring is critical to achieving and maintaining a well-performing system. In this article, the first in a three-part series, Nicholas Whitehead explains how to do low-level granular monitoring of Java™ performance efficiently. The data you generate can provide valuable insights into system operation and reveal constraints and influences that affect an environment's stability and performance.

I've been asked several times how to make my example of javaagent which starts a firewall friendly JMX RMI Connector work on JDK 5. Well, here is how. However, beware of the catch: if you use SSL and want to connect with JConsole then you need to use Java 6 JConsole on the client side.

A Java Champion since September 2005, Kirk Pepperdine is a primary contributor to javaperformancetuning.com, which is widely regarded as the premier site for Java performance tuning information, and is the coauthor of Ant Developer's Handbook. He has been heavily involved in application performance since the beginning of his programming career and has tuned applications in a variety of languages: Cray Assembler, C, Smalltalk, and, since 1996, Java technology. He has also worked on building middleware for distributed applications.

It's more than likely that VisualVM plugin developers will be interested in accessing their JMX instrumented applications from within VisualVM. The VisualVM-Tools module adds some public APIs for JMX-related things in the com.sun.tools.visualvm.tools.jmx package required to get access to the underlying JMX connection and also to retrieve the JVM MXBeans that will grant access to the underlying JVM instrumentation.

Dustin Marx has written a rather good post on JMX MXBeans: "I'll demonstrate the tremendous utility of the JMX MXBean in this blog entry. While doing so, I'll also demonstrate the usefulness of a J2SE 5 enum for reporting a set of discrete status values and will demonstrate the highly useful JMX (introduced with Java SE 6) class's newMBeanProxy and newMXBeanProxy methods."

In addition to comprehensive monitoring and application management support offered by J2SE 5.0, JDK 5.0 and 6.0 include the Java Monitoring & Management Console tool, also known as JConsole. The jconsole command launches a graphical console tool that enables you to monitor and manage Java applications on a local or remote machine.

Another excellent article by Dustin Marx: "A Second Look at JMX Web Services Connector: winrm In A First Look at JMX Web Services Connector (also available as a previous blog entry), I demonstrated using JConsole to access a simple sample server using the reference implementation of the JMX Web Services Connector (JSR-262). In this blog entry, I am going to scratch the surface of using Vista's winrm (a WS-Management implementation) to access an MBean server using the JMX Web Services Connector."

JMX Gem Released

I have simply put together a small JavaScript slide show from some JMX 2.0 Namespace slides presented by Eamonn at JavaOne 2008.

My colleague Jean-Francois expands on how to enhance his RESTful adaptor for JMX to handle more complex use cases - like atomic snapshots of dependant data (e.g. a MemoryUsage record) and pulling resource notifications...

Those interested in plugging into VisualVM now have a collection of NetBeans module samples at their disposal. Each presents a different way of interacting with the VisualVM APIs to extend VisualVM.

Anyone interested in application manageability and/or management integration should read about Jean-Francois Denise’s prototype for RESTful Access to JMX Instrumentation. Not (at least for now) as something to make use of, but to force us to think pragmatically about the pros and cons of the WS-* stack when used for management integration.

"This is the fourth installment in my summary of the sessions I attended at JavaOne this year. The previous installments covered Java futures, Java programming practice, and concurrency. This one covers JMX stuff."

A smattering of Java 7 news on JSR 292 invokedynamic, JSR 262 JMX WS Connector, and JSR 203 NIO2.

Jean-Francois Denise presents an in-depth description of the demo performed at the end of the JMX session at JavaOne 2008. In particular, he shows how VBScript was used to interact with a JMX agent through the WS-Management stack provided by the WebServices connector for JMX (JSR 262)

JMX Mapping to OpenTypes: MXBean Complex Attribute Types. How do you export a complex data type, such as the content of a Map> using MXBeans, to obtain a mapping to a desired OpenType? By Daniel Fuchs.

In this blog entry, I attempt to demonstrate how one can connect to GlassFish's exposed administrative MBeans via Remote JMX. I will use JConsole and a simple client built with standard JMX Connector Client APIs to demonstrate this.

Brian’s talk focused pretty much exclusively on the new fork-join framework that will be added as part of the JSR 166 extension in Java 7.

One of the most complicated aspects of generics in the Java™ language is wildcards, and in particular, the treatment and confusing error messages surrounding wildcard capture. In this installment of Java theory and practice, veteran Java developer Brian Goetz deciphers some of the weirder-looking error messages emitted by javac and offers some tricks and workarounds that can simplify using generics.

“Self-modifying code...” used to be a phrase always uttered (by us hackers) with tones of both admiration and dread. Admiration, because there are stories from the earliest days of the stored program computer of how impossibly clever programmers would make their code flip state with perfect grace, simply by modifying (as data) an instruction it was about to execute. Dread, because when we tried the graceful flip on our own, the usual result was... less graceful. Painful, actually. Yet many of us all have a self-modifying code story, somewhere back in time, that we view with pride, perhaps like the bowler’s perfect game, or the golfer’s hole-in-one.

Keddar explains "the communication details between Domain Admin Server, node-agents and server instances in Sun's Application Server 8.x and 9.x (GlassFish V2)." One of these communication channel is JMX.

The 10.4.1 version of Java DB, the world's most advanced Java database, has some really cool features -- asynchronous replication, table functions and JMX capabilities. Sun engineers worked within the Apache/Derby community to develop these features.

The JMX API is being updated by JSR 255. That JSR is currently planned to be part of Java SE 7, and some of the API changes it defines have started to appear in JDK 7. So far, the main one is a Query Language. Here's what that is and what it's for.