Simple Server Monitoring with Java

Question

I'm trying to find a solution that allows me to monitor resource consumption of a server. Preferably, the metrics I'm wanting to obtain are network utilisation IO, and if possible CPU usage/load average and disk IO.

The only other requirement I have is that this information be obtainable by Java so it can be manipulated, and at least work on Linux (Fedora).

I've heard about a few monitoring tools but I'm just not sure of the best way of going about this. I would probably want to be gathering the information about every 30 seconds.

Thanks

Update: Just to re-iterate, I am referring to system-wide monitoring NOT Java specific monitoring. I just want to use Java to access to these metrics

Answer 1

You could choose to delegate the monitoring to a dedicated tool like Cacti, Centreon, or Zenoss but this might be a bit overkill for a single application.

For a simple solution, JMX might indeed be a better solution. As starting point, I suggest reading the following article: Monitoring Local and Remote Applications Using JMX 1.2 and JConsole. Then, have a look at Using JConsole to Monitor Applications, a very detailed article that shows how to use JConsole to access several core monitoring and management functionalities provided by the Java platform including:

• Detect low memory
• Enable or disable GC and class loading verbose tracing
• Detect deadlocks
• Control the log level of any loggers in an application
• Access OS resources—Sun's platform extension
• Manage an application's Managed Beans (MBeans)

But, AFAIK, JMX won't give you access to network IO so you might need a combination of these tools. Luckily, many tools (e.g. Cacti, SmokePing) use the RDD format that you can easily manipulate with Java APIs like JRobin or rdd4j.