Monitoring and Management in Java

Monitoring and Management in Java 2 Platform, Standard Edition 1.5 Technology

Sanjay Radia, Sun Microsystems
Mandy Chung, Sun Microsystems

JSR 3, 163
Use JMX MBeans. When you use MBeans, they are deployed to a Platform MBeans Server and are then avialable for interrogation. Normally you connect via RMI over SSL via the JMX Management Application. JConsole is an example of this kind of application and is available out of the box with JDK 1.5(actually 5.0 with the new naming scheme). You could also plug LDAP in as a client of the Platform MBean server and have it manage permissions and authentication of the MBeans Server data.

In a nutshell, the MBeans Server acts as a container for the MBeans(abstract datasource) and JConsole is a front end for this datasource. Optionally you could plug in LDAP to act as a kind of controller to allow/disallow access to management data.

MXBeans allow Richer types(primitive types, Enum, List, Map, Classes with getters) than MBeans.