ZenPacks.zenoss.ZenJMX-4.2.3_3.9.3-6.lbn13egg.noarch

ZenJMX is a full-featured JMX client that works "out of the box" with JMX agents that have their remote APIs enabled. It supports authenticated and unauthenticated connections, and it can retrieve single-value attributes, complex-value attributes, and the results of invoking an operation. Operations with parameters are also supported so long as the parameters are primitive types (Strings, booleans, numbers), as well as the object version of primitives (such as java.lang.Integer and java.lang.Float). Multi-value responses from operations (Maps and Lists) are supported, as are primitive responses from operations.

The JMX data source installed by ZenJMX allows you to define the connection, authentication, and retrieval information you want to use to retrieve performance information. The IP address is extracted from the parent device, but the port number of the JMX Agent is configurable in each data source. This allows you to operate multiple JMX Agents on a single device and retrieve performance information for each agent separately. This is commonly used on production servers that run multiple applications.

Authentication information is also associated with each JMX data source. This offers the most flexibility for site administrators because they can run some JMX agents in an open, unauthenticated fashion and others in a hardened and authenticated fashion. SSL-wrapped connections are supported by the underlying JMX Remote subsystem built into the JDK, but were not tested in the Zenoss labs. As a result, your success with SSL encrypted access to JMX Agents may vary.

The data source allows you to define the type of performance information you want to achieve: single-value attribute, complex-value attribute, or operation invocation. To specify the type of retrieval, you must specify an attribute name (and one or more data points) or provide operation information.

Any numerical value returned by a JMX agent can be retrieved by Zenoss and graphed and checked against thresholds. Non-numerical values (Strings and complex types) cannot be retrieved and stored by Zenoss.

When setting up data points, make sure you understand the semantics of the attribute name and choose the correct Zenoss data point type. Many JMX Agent implementations use inconsistent nomenclature when describing attributes. In some cases the term "Count" refers to an ever-increasing number (a "Counter" data point type). In other cases the term "Count" refers to a snapshot number (a "Gauge" data point type).