Instrumenting EJBs with JMX

[cunparis]

I'm curious if anyone has instrumented their EJBs with JMX? If so what was your experience? What attributes and operations did you expose to JMX? Was it beneficial?

[channingwalton]

Hi,
we are doing this at the moment. We have a bunch of JBoss servers containing EntityBeans managed through MBeans. (In fact, there wil only be one instance of this particular EntityBean-MBean pair per server.)

The reason we are doing this is that we want to have a remote naming service to look up each of the servers by name, and so we are binding the remote Handle's from the EntityBeans to the naming service (JBoss server too).

We cannot do this with MBeans yet - see my post 'bind/lookup MBeans to remote JNDI server'

We are pretty much exposing the entire EntityBean interface through the MBean.

Channing

[cunparis]

I don't understand the motivation for exposing the Entity bean to JMX. Let's say you have a Person entity bean, with attributes such as Name, Address, etc. What can you do with this information from JMX? Entities are pretty short lived (during the transaction basically) and after that they go away. If you looked at an Entity with JMX it'd just be a snapshot.

I hope you can explain this more because I'm really not understanding JMX and how it can be useful.

[channingwalton]

We may well be doing the wrong thing. But we need to be able to use a name server that allows entities from multiple servers to bind to, and to discover other entities in other servers.
(In our app there is only one instance of the Entity per server.)

We are using JMX to manage each server which includes configuring where the naming service is and the names of remote Entities (which are found through the naming service).

We are very new to all this so we may be using JMX improperly.

Channing