concept JMX Console in category jboss

This is an excerpt from Manning's book JBoss in Action: Configuring the JBoss Application Server. Login to get full access to this book.

The JBoss Management section gives you links to different web-based management applications that come prepackaged with JBoss AS. The Tomcat Status web application gives you status information on the JBoss Web Server, which is built on top of Tomcat. We talk about the JBoss Web Server in chapter 5. The JMX Console gives you a view into the services and applications running on JBoss AS. If you click the JMX Console link, you can try it out. We discuss the JMX Console application in detail in chapter 2.

The jboss:type=Service,name=SystemProperties enables you to examine the system properties. The showAll method returns a collection of system properties. The output from the showAll method as seen in the JMX Console is shown in figure 2.7. The list of properties is in alphabetical order. Well, actually, it’s ASCII order.

Figure 2.7. Viewing the system properties in the JMX Console

Although the JMX Console is a convenient tool for a developer, it’s not an adequate tool for managing the application server. For example, a single data source is represented by four MBeans, each of which appears in the agent view with different links; there’s no single page from which a data source can be managed.

Additionally, any changes made using the JMX Console are transient. If you restart the application server, all changes are lost. This is because the JMX Console only calls on the MBeans to change property values; it doesn’t modify the XML configuration files used to initialize the MBeans when the application server starts.