Chapter 14. Administering and monitoring ActiveMQ

The final topic left to be covered is management and monitoring of ActiveMQ broker instances. As with any other infrastructure software, it’s important for developers and administrators to be able to monitor broker metrics during runtime and notice any suspicious behavior that could possibly impact messaging clients. Also, you might want to interact with your broker in other ways. For example, you might want to change broker configuration properties or send test messages from administration consoles. ActiveMQ implements some features beyond the standard JMS API that allow for administration and monitoring both programmatically and by using well-known administration tools.

We’ll start this chapter with the explanation of the Java Management Extension API (JMX), the standard API for managing Java applications. Next, we’ll explain the concept of advisory messages, which allow you to receive important notifications from the broker in a more messaging-like manner.

In later sections we’ll focus on administrator tools for interacting with brokers. We’ll explore some of the tools embedded in the ActiveMQ distribution such as the command agent and the web console as well as some of the external tools such as JConsole.

14.1. The JMX API and ActiveMQ

14.2. Monitoring ActiveMQ with advisory messages

14.3. Tools for ActiveMQ administration

14.4. Configuring ActiveMQ logging

14.5. Summary