The Java Monitoring and Management Console (jconsole)
This page is dedicated to the Java Monitoring and Management Console, the jconsole tool, in the OpenJDK project.
Introduction
The jconsole tool is a JMX-compliant graphical tool for monitoring a Java virtual machine. It can monitor both local and remote JVMs. It can also monitor and manage an application.
See Using JConsole for more information on jconsole's functionality and the jconsole command-line tool documentation for jconsole's command-line options.
JConsole Implementation Sources
The JConsole implementation is composed of the following packages:
- sun.tools.jconsole: This is a Sun private package containing the implementation of the entire jconsole tool except the MBeans tab.
- sun.tools.jconsole.inspector: This is a Sun private package containing the implementation of the MBeans tab.
- sun.tools.jconsole.resources: This is a Sun private package containing the resource bundles and image files.
- com.sun.tools.jconsole: This is a Sun public documented package containing the JConsole plug-in API that allows customers to extend JConsole's functionality. In addition to the existing standard tabs, you can add your own custom tabs to JConsole, to perform your own monitoring activities. The JConsole plug-in API provides a mechanism by which you can, for example, add a new tab to JConsole to provide a specific view of your own application's MBeans.
Contributing to JConsole
To contribute to JConsole, make sure you read the page explaining how to contribute to the OpenJDK project, and follow the rules and guidelines described there. You will find out that there can be many ways to contribute: one of them is to contribute to the quality.
JConsole doesn't contain native code. It's a pure java tool. OpenJDK comes with a JConsole NetBeans Integrated Development Environment (IDE) project that will help contributors interested in making changes to and/or fixing bugs in the jconsole tool to modify, build, run and test jconsole in a standalone manner as well as generating the javadoc for the JConsole plug-in API. This NetBeans project will let you work on JConsole without having to build the whole OpenJDK sources from scratch.
If you wish to work on JConsole using the NetBeans IDE project provided with OpenJDK, you will need to download and install the following prerequisites:
- NetBeans IDE 6.0
- The latest OpenJDK (or JDK 7) binary bits
- The jtreg test harness
To build and test JConsole refer to the README file associated with the JConsole NetBeans project, located in the OpenJDK source tree under j2se/make/netbeans/jconsole/.
It is also possible to build and test JConsole with Ant, using the build.xml file provided in the j2se/make/netbeans/jconsole/ directory. However, you will need to download and install Apache Ant version 1.6.5 or above, as well as the latest OpenJDK (or JDK 7) binary bits and the jtreg test harness (see above).
- Go to the j2se/make/netbeans/jconsole/ directory.
- Make sure you read the README first as you might need to edit some properties in the project's configuration files.
- To build JConsole, run the command 'ant build'.
- To test JConsole, run the command 'ant test'.
- To run JConsole, run the command 'ant run'.
You might be also interested in contributing to the JMX technology and/or other serviceability tools.
Documentation
- Using JConsole
- jconsole command-line tool
- Monitoring and Management for the Java Platform
- Java Management Extensions (JMX)
- Java SE Core Technologies - Monitoring and Management
- Using JConsole to Monitor Applications
- Monitoring and Managing Java SE 6 Platform Applications
Community
- Mailing lists
