Remote monitoring of Tomcat

Got memory leaks? Dogged by OutOfMemoryErrors?

JDK 1.5 and later come with jconsole.

First you have to tell Tomcat how to publish it's inner workings for jconsole. This process differs by platform and also depends on how you installed Tomcat.

The typical MacOS X install consists of downloading the zip and expanding it somewhere. The "somewhere" is your CATALINA_HOME. If that's how you installed Tomcat, go to $CATALINA_HOME/bin and create a file called setenv.sh. Into it put this line:

export CATALINA_OPTS="-Dcom.sun.management.jmxremote \
-Dcom.sun.management.jmxremote.port=8086 -Dcom.sun.management.jmxremote.ssl=false \
-Dcom.sun.management.jmxremote.authenticate=false"

On RHEL, Tomcat is typically installed via rpm – I use yum. In that case, you need to add the CATALINA_OPTS to /etc/sysconfig/tomcat6 Leave out the "export" since this file is not a shell script.

Now reboot Tomcat and you're good to go.

Connecting is trivial. Start jconsole. On MacOS X, simply type jconsole at the command line and it opens. For other other platforms, let me know and I will add it.

When jconsole comes up, it will have discovered any local tomcats so simply connect. For a remote tomcat, connect using port 8086 as specified above, and leave user name and password empty.

That's it!

Labels: macos, rhel, tomcat

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