JMX - Remote applications

Post jdk 5, JMX has become part of the standard distribution. The default MBeans provided, provide quite a good view of the VM characteristics. However, connecting to remote applications (running on different VM) is not a very straight forward task. The tricky part is the difficult to find documentation about the rmiserver and the URL format to be used for lookup.

Sample JVM_ARGS:

-Dcom.sun.management.jmxremote.port=5000 (put your own non-conflicting port)
-Dcom.sun.management.jmxremote
-Dcom.sun.management.jmxremote.authenticate=false
-Dcom.sun.management.jmxremote.ssl=false
-Djava.rmi.server.hostname=

which would look like
-Djava.rmi.server.hostname=144.203.88.87

The actual call would look like: java $JVM_ARGS MY_APP. This would invoke the JVM with an JMX Agent running on 5000 port, on a remote server whose ip-address is 144.208.88.87

Now open the jconsole application, invoke your application. Assuming that the application runs for a significant period of time (so that we can actually initiate the handshake and gather stats), enter the following in the Remote Process field

service:jmx:rmi://144.203.88.87:5000/jndi/rmi://144.203.88.87:5000/jmxrmi

Thats it! we are good to go.

Some good pointers on interwebs:

here
here and
here