Using JConsole to Monitor Applications

Using JConsole to Monitor Applications: "Article
Using JConsole to Monitor Applications

By Mandy Chung, December 2004

The Java 2 Platform, Standard Edition (J2SE) 5.0 release provides comprehensive monitoring and management support. It not only defines the management interfaces for the Java virtual machine, but also provides out-of-the-box remote monitoring and management on the Java platform and of applications that run on it. In addition, JDK 5.0 includes the Java Monitoring and Management Console (JConsole) tool. It uses the extensive instrumentation of the Java virtual machine to provide information on performance and resource consumption of applications running on the Java platform using Java Management Extension (JMX) technology.

The article describes how JConsole can be used to observe information about an application running on the Java platform. The article first gives an overview of the J2SE 5.0 monitoring and management architecture and how JConsole plugs into the architecture. It then describes how to use JConsole to access several core monitoring and management functionalities provided by the Java platform including:

* Detect low memory
* Enable or disable GC and class loading verbose tracing
* Detect deadlocks
* Control the log level of any loggers in an application
* Access OS resources—Sun's platform extension
* Manage an application's Managed Beans (MBeans)"