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.

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):

    

    
    
        
        
        
    
 
    
        
    
 
    
        
    
 
    
    

    
    
        
  
        
            
        
    
        
            
                org.hibernate.dialect.HSQLDialect
                true
            
        
    
 
    
  
    
        
      

       
    
        
    

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? :)