Tomcat offers an alternative to using remote (or even local) JMX connections while still giving you access to everything JMX has to offer: Tomcat’s JMXProxyServlet.
The JMXProxyServlet allows a client to issue JMX queries via an HTTP interface. This technique offers the following advantages over using JMX directly from a client program:
You don’t have to launch a full JVM and make a remote JMX connection just to ask for one small piece of data from a running server
- You don’t have to know how to work with JMX connections
- You don’t need any of the complex configuration covered in the rest of this page
- Your client program does not have to be written in Java
A perfect example of JMX overkill can be seen in the case of popular server-monitoring software such as Nagios or Ichinga: if you want to monitor 10 items via JMX, you will have to launch 10 JVMs, make 10 JMX connections, and then shut them all down every few minutes. With the JMXProxyServlet, you can make 10 HTTP connections and be done with it.
You can find out more information about the JMXProxyServlet in the documentation for the Tomcat manager.
