Question

I am looking for a JMX querying tool. I have come across jolokia & jmxtrans, both support JSON based querying. JMXtrans has writers to monitoring tools which I think is missing in Jolokia. I googled, but I didn’t get much info comparing the two.
But I have read positive blog posts wrt both tools. If anyone has used these earlier,pls share ur experiences…

Answer 1

I’m the author of jmxtrans. I considered Jolokia before I developed jmxtrans. I choose to develop with jmxtrans because I had a different usecase in mind.

Jolokia runs as a war in Tomcat. It is similar to jmxtrans in that it allows you to query a JMX server, but that is about where the similarity ends. You would need to implement the rest of jmxtrans on top of Jolokia in order to have feature parity.

On the other hand, jmxtrans is standalone with no requirements on Tomcat. My target audience is the netops/devops role. It is configured with a relatively simple JSON based structure so it doesn’t require an engineering degree to configure and use it.

The thought is that you use jmxtrans to continuously monitor services which expose statistics via jmx. You use jmxtrans to ‘transform’ data from jmx to whatever output format you want. Generally, devops people want to integrate their JVMs with some sort of monitoring solution like Graphite/Ganglia so I provided output writers for those tools.

jmxtrans is also very smart about how it does queries against jmx servers and there is a bit of optimization in there for that. There is also a lot of work to allow you to do things like parallelize requests to many servers to enable to you scale jmxtrans to continuously query hundreds of servers with a single jmxtrans instance.

I hope that clarifies things a bit. If you have any specific questions, I’m happy to answer them.