A good series on JMX

If you haven't been paying much attention to JMX (Java Management Extensions), it might be worth your time to do so. It's such a simple API that a lot of people ignore it. Bill de hÓra recently pointed to the first of a series on JMX by Sing Li on the developerWorks site.

The three part series is called "From black boxes to enterprises".

1. Add manageability to your Java-based systems today
2. Coding your own standard and dynamic MBeans
3. Connecting JMX Agent to a real-life network management system

Part 3 delves into a complete solution and is quite a bit beyond what we have in place today, but we're pretty happy with what we've implemented thus far.Our biggest win has been the ease of exposing configuration settings via JSPs (rather than having people go directly to the somewhat complicated MBean pages) and in debugging. I hope to have more about how we're using JMX for debugging soon.

I did note that Tomcat 4.1 has it's own JMX engine in place, which could make moving moving from JBoss with Tomcat 4.0.x somewhat dicey. I wasn't planning on that bump in the road.