Besides jvm stats, we had custom application stats that we wanted monitored. These stats were originally available for query by snmp.
The snmp manager tools are too much trouble to import a custom mib. Custom Mibs are too much trouble to manage, change etc. (devs need to know too much about it).

The snmp managers mostly just shielded rrdtool anyway and forced you to use their crappy UI to edit rrdtool properties. So we bypassed them altogether.
Now we have also removed snmp, so all stats are available over http. (Not quite RESTful, but a decent start).

When we finally got rid of snmp, it made the adding new metrics really easy, many more devs have been adding them now. Before it was just too costly in time/effort for ppl new to it to work it all out to add new ones.

http://java.sun.com/developer/technicalArticles/J2SE/jconsole.html

In my snmpd.conf, I added this line:
“proxy -v 2c -c public 127.0.0.1:1666 .1.3.6.1.4.1.42″. So if I simply do “snmpwalk -v 2c -c public 127.0.0.1 .1″, it will include my Tomcat’s JVM info.

Not it leaves me wondering if I can include multiple JVMs into NET-SNMP… I can specify different port value (”-Dcom.sun.management.snmp.port=xxxx”) for each JVM but I am thinking the JVM-MANAGEMENT-MIB’s OIDs will collide. May be I can tweak the (top) OID inside JVM-MANAGEMENT-MIB so each JVM has it’s own MIB with different OIDs. Just a theory.

I also want to add that I tried to write (more like hack) the same SNMP JVM proxy using SNMP4J (snmp4j.org), I had some success but using the NET-SNMP with JVM-MANAGEMENT-MIB is definitely cleaner and require less future maintenance.

I just want to point out one thing, in your snmptranslate above,
“snmptranslate -M .:/usr/share/snmp/mibs -m JVM-MANAGEMENT-MIB -IR-Tp jvmMgtMIB”
there should be a space between “-IR-Tp”, so it should be
“snmptranslate -M .:/usr/share/snmp/mibs -m JVM-MANAGEMENT-MIB -IR -Tp jvmMgtMIB”

This is working out beautifully. Thanks again.

Have you integrated the JVM monitoring to JFFNMS yet??