Remote Monitoring, APIs, and JMX

Recently I went along to the Cambridge Java Group. Enjoyable evening - would be great to get more people along, so if there's anybody else in Cambridge interested in Java and related technologies then do come along!

I talked about JKstat briefly, and I hope that some people found it interesting. One of the comments was along the lines of "hey, you could expose this with JMX and monitor it remotely". I had looked at JMX before, and had largely ignored it because I couldn't see an easy way to use the technology. So I tried again, putting together a bean interface and implementation, and a simple server.

I pointed jconsole at it, and it works. I can see the data I exposed there in jconsole. So, that proves that my code works. But is that it? After all, jconsole can do some quite sophisticated monitoring of a JVM, and give pretty graphs. But there seems to be a fair amount of domain-specific knowledge that has gone into that, which is hard-coded into the client. And I really don't want to write (yet another) client interface - the whole point is to leverage what is claimed to be considerable investment in JMX tooling.

This investment must be kept locked safely away. I've had a look around, and really can't see much in the way of fully functional general-purpose JMX clients. (Here's a list.)

Of course, I've been here before. I ended up writing my own SNMP client because I couldn't find anything else that did what I wanted. I really don't want to do the same for JMX.

So, a question: what do people use for monitoring that uses JMX? How valuable is it?

Of course, you wouldn't actually set up a JMX server and client specifically for accessing JKstat. That would be silly. After all, JKstat comes with a fully functional client-server mode that exposes all the data you need in a reasonably efficient manner. The ideal case for using JMX would be when you had an existing system already being monitored with JMX, at which point you could simply add JKstat support to gain access to extra data without adding additional protocols or tools.

I've also been looking at other client-server technologies. One that I'll probably do (partly because it shares some framework with JMX, partly because I know how to do it anyway) is RMI. But that, like JMX, is fairly specific to Java. It would be nice to have something that was capable of communicating with, say, python (or pretty much any scripting language). You would have thought that because I had used XML-RPC then I would be able to access it from anything else using XML-RPC, but that's not the case. I needed to use extensions to get sensible type support (like the fact that much of the data is stored as a long not an int), and those aren't commonly deployed. I was, therefore, intrigued by Theo's rant which summed up my thoughts exactly, and saved me the trouble of investigating JSON, as it's clearly not up to the task either.

So many half-baked answers. Go on, somebody - tell me what I'm missing!