Java Reference
In-Depth Information
without regard to platform dependency. In addition to the benefits of the Java
language,
JMX
has some persuasive advantages.
Ease of use
JMX
has a significant advantage over technologies like
SNMP
because a pro-
grammer with Java experience can quickly pick up the concepts of
JMX
and
become productive. The knowledge level required to master
SNMP
is signifi-
cant: the developer must know the development language used and master the
concepts of
SNMP
, which are not easily understood. The study of
SNMP
and the
encoding and compilers is a lengthy process.
On the other hand, managing an application with
JMX
is simple and straight-
forward (especially if your applications are written in Java). A developer can
instrument an application for management with just a few lines of code.
Leveraging existing technologies
When you're building a
JMX
management environment, you do not have to
throw out your existing management structure: existing management tools can
plug into the
JMX
technology. As mentioned earlier,
JMX
provides the capability
for building communication with any protocol (such as
SNMP
or
HTTP
) and con-
nectivity with any other transport (such as Java
RMI
). In addition, if no manage-
ment capabilities are natively built into the existing enterprise devices and
applications, you can build
JMX
agents that act on their behalf and present man-
agement capabilities to the operations center.
Componentization
JMX
allows you to build your management solution in a componentized fashion.
You can choose to expose entire devices or applications, or just a subset of their
configurable features. In addition, if you send your applications to a customer,
you can include management components that will plug directly into their man-
agement solution suite.
Alerts, events, and statistics
With
JMX
, you can instrument your application to push information about its
current state of health as well as useful statistics you want to maintain. Using
JMX
, you can gather information from other managed resources such as the web
server or databases.
JMX
provides a notification system that takes advantage of Java as an object-
oriented language. Notifications provide a rich capability to distribute Java
