Watch your Spring webapp: Hibernate and log4j over JMX

I have been actively using Java Management Extensions (JMX), particularly within web applications, in order to monitor application internals and sometimes tune some parameters at runtime. There are few very useful tools supplied as part of JDK, JConsole and JVisualVM, which allow to connect to your application via JMX and manipulate with exposed managed beans.

I am going to leave apart basic JMX concepts and concentrate on interesting use cases:
- exposing log4j over JMX (which allows to change LOG LEVEL at runtime)
- exposing Hibernate statistics over JMX

In order to simplify a bit all routines with exposing managed beans I will use Spring Framework which has awesome JMX support driven by annotations. Let's have our first Spring context snippet: exposing log4j over JMX.

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<!--xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?-->   <beans xmlns="http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xmlns:context="http://www.springframework.org/schema/context" xsi:schemalocation="http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans  http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans/spring-beans-3.0.xsd  http://www.springframework.org/schema/context  http://www.springframework.org/schema/context/spring-context-3.0.xsd">       <!-- Some beans here -->       <!-- JMX related bean definitions -->     <bean id="exporter" class="org.springframework.jmx.export.MBeanExporter">         <property name="assembler" ref="assembler">         <property name="namingStrategy" ref="namingStrategy">         <property name="autodetect" value="true">     </property></property></property></bean>        <bean id="assembler" class="org.springframework.jmx.export.assembler.MetadataMBeanInfoAssembler">         <property name="attributeSource" ref="jmxAttributeSource">     </property></bean>        <bean id="namingStrategy" class="org.springframework.jmx.export.naming.MetadataNamingStrategy">         <property name="attributeSource" ref="jmxAttributeSource">     </property></bean>        <bean id="jmxAttributeSource" class="org.springframework.jmx.export.annotation.AnnotationJmxAttributeSource">     </bean>       <!-- Exposing Log4j over JMX -->     <bean name="jmxLog4j" class="org.apache.log4j.jmx.HierarchyDynamicMBean">     </bean> </beans>

That's how it look like inside JVisualVM with VisualVM-MBeans plugin installed (please notice that root's logger LOG LEVEL (priority) could be changed from WARN to any, let say, DEBUG, at runtime and have effect immediately):

Let's add Hibernate to JMX view! In order to do that I will create very simple Hibernate configuration using Spring context XML file (I will repeat configuration for JMX-related beans but it's exactly the same as in previous example):

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<!--xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?--> <beans xmlns="http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xmlns:context="http://www.springframework.org/schema/context" xmlns:jdbc="http://www.springframework.org/schema/jdbc" xsi:schemalocation="http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans         http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans/spring-beans-3.0.xsd  http://www.springframework.org/schema/jdbc  http://www.springframework.org/schema/jdbc/spring-jdbc-3.0.xsd  http://www.springframework.org/schema/context  http://www.springframework.org/schema/context/spring-context-3.0.xsd">       <!-- Some beans here -->       <!-- JMX related bean definitions -->     <bean id="exporter" class="org.springframework.jmx.export.MBeanExporter">         <property name="assembler" ref="assembler">         <property name="namingStrategy" ref="namingStrategy">         <property name="autodetect" value="true">     </property></property></property></bean>        <bean id="assembler" class="org.springframework.jmx.export.assembler.MetadataMBeanInfoAssembler">         <property name="attributeSource" ref="jmxAttributeSource">     </property></bean>        <bean id="namingStrategy" class="org.springframework.jmx.export.naming.MetadataNamingStrategy">         <property name="attributeSource" ref="jmxAttributeSource">     </property></bean>        <bean id="jmxAttributeSource" class="org.springframework.jmx.export.annotation.AnnotationJmxAttributeSource">     </bean>       <!-- Basic Hibernate configuration -->     <bean id="sessionFactory" class="org.springframework.orm.hibernate3.LocalSessionFactoryBean">         <property name="configurationClass" value="org.hibernate.cfg.AnnotationConfiguration">             <property name="dataSource">             <ref bean="dataSource">         </ref></property>               <property name="hibernateProperties">             <props>                 <prop key="hibernate.dialect">org.hibernate.dialect.HSQLDialect</prop>                 <prop key="hibernate.generate_statistics">true</prop>             </props>         </property>     </property></bean>        <jdbc:embedded-database id="dataSource" type="HSQL"></jdbc:embedded-database>         <bean id="transactionManager" class="org.springframework.orm.hibernate3.HibernateTransactionManager">         <property name="sessionFactory" ref="sessionFactory">     </property></bean>        <!-- Exposing Hibernate Statistics over JMX -->       <bean name="hibernateStatistics" class="org.hibernate.jmx.StatisticsService">         <property name="sessionFactory" ref="sessionFactory">     </property></bean> </beans>

And now we see this picture (please notice very important Hibernate property in order to see some real data here hibernate.generate_statistics = true):

Cool, simple and very useful, isn't it? :)