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Apply JMX Best Practices
Learn five key best practices for using JMX to build more management-ready applications
by Chris Peltz and Pankaj Kumar

December 10, 2004

Java applications are being built with many complex, distributed components. Nearly all applications today interface with legacy systems or other IT resources. The distributed nature of these applications provides an incredible challenge for IT, which carries the burden of maintaining the application, and all its dependencies, once it's been developed.

The problem is further complicated as organizations begin to adopt Service-Oriented Architectures (SOAs). SOA introduces a design style where applications are exposed as services connected in a loosely coupled fashion. In an SOA approach, application components are often developed with different programming languages and platforms. In some cases the connection between a client and a service provider is not determined until runtime.

Organizations looking to leverage SOA now require a better way to manage their distributed applications and services. Use of well-established, low-level management technologies such as SNMP is no longer sufficient to handle the heterogeneous and dynamic nature of today's applications. A service-oriented style of management is needed—META Group refers to this as a Service-Oriented Management Architecture or (SOMA). (see Resources.)

SOMA allows for the peaceful coexistence of heterogeneous, managed systems and management applications. A service-oriented style to management can eliminate the artificial barriers that exist today because of dependence on specific management APIs on specific platforms. Let's take a closer look at how SOMA can be realized in Java through the Java Management Extension (JMX) API.

In addition to allowing better integration among management products, SOMA can make it easier to develop custom management applications. While organizations often rely on out-of-box management solutions, there also may be a need to build customized dashboards for monitoring specific subsets of management data. An SOA style to management would enable a team to quickly build a management application using data fed from Web services, a common technology used in SOA implementations.

SOMA Says
It's important to make a distinction between a management interface and a management implementation. The design principles outlined in a SOMA are concerned mostly with the interfaces between a managed system and the applications being managed. SOMA says nothing about the underlying implementation used in exposing a managed resource. An application might be instrumented with a particular API and exposed with a different management interface. For example, Java developers might use JMX to add manageability in their application. JMX enables developers to instrument their applications with JMX MBeans so that a JMX MBean server can discover and access these managed resources.

JMX is more than just a programming API; it defines an architecture consisting of monitoring and management services and a distributed layer consisting of connectors and adapters. A developer could use a standard RMI connector to expose the management interface externally. However, using an RMI connector may not be the best approach if you are looking to expose more of a service-oriented management interface.