3.6. Simplified Administration

Overview

Red Hat JBoss A-MQ provides many ways to manage and administer a messaging system. Some of these are built into the broker. Others are add-ons that you can download separately.

Advisory messages

Act as administrative channels from which you can receive status on events taking place on the broker and on producers, consumers, and destinations in real time. They provide an alternative to JMX for discovering the running state of an active broker. Using Red Hat JBoss A-MQ advisory messages, you can monitor the messaging system using regular JMS messages, which are generated on system-defined topics. You can also use advisory messages to modify an application's behavior dynamically.
JBoss A-MQ uses advisory messages internally to notify connections on the availability of temporary destinations and to notify a network of brokers on the availability of consumers.
All advisory topics, except message delivery, are enabled by default. To enable the message delivery advisory topic, you must configure it in the destination policy in the broker's configuration file.
For details, see ActiveMQ in Action (Snyder, Bosanac, and Davies).

Command Agent

Enabling a Command Agent on the broker, you can communicate with it directly to issue administrative queries and commands, such as listing available queues, topics, and subscriptions; or to view metadata, browse queues, and so on.
When enabled, the command agent listens to the ActiveMQ.Agent topic for messages. It processes all commands that are submitted as JMS text messages and posts the results back to ActiveMQ.Agent.

Interceptor plug-ins

JBoss A-MQ provides several plug-ins for visualizing broker components and for retrieving statistics collected on a running broker.
  • Authentication—Two plug-ins; one provides Simple authentication, and the other provides JAAS authentication.
  • Central timestamp—Updates the timestamp on messages as they arrive at the broker. Useful when clients' system clocks are out-of-sync with the broker's clock.
  • Enhanced logging—Enables you to log messages sent or acknowledged on the broker.
  • Statistics—Sends statistics about a running broker to the destination ActiveMQ.Statistics.Broker and statistics about a destination to the destination ActiveMQ.Statistics.Destination.<destination_name>.
    You retrieve these statistics by sending an empty message to their corresponding destination.
  • Visualization—Two plug-ins; each generates a graph file for different broker components, which you can display using several publicly available visualization tools.
    The connectionDotFilePlugin generates graphs of the broker's connections and associated clients. The destinationDotFilePlugin generates a graph of the destination hierarchies for all queues and topics in the broker.
For more information, see ActiveMQ in Action (Snyder, Bosanac, and Davies).

JMX

JBoss A-MQ provides extensive support for monitoring and controlling the broker's behavior from a JMX console, such as jConsole.
For details, see Using JMX in Managing and Monitoring a Broker on the Red Hat Customer Portal.

management console

The Red Hat JBoss A-MQ management console provides centralized provisioning and monitoring of brokers deployed in a fabric.

JBoss Operations Network

JBoss Operations Network is a web-based SOA management and monitoring system based on Hyperic HQ Enterprise. It takes advantage of JBoss A-MQ's JMX-based reporting capabilities to provide real time administration and control of all runtime components.
For details, see the JBoss Operations Network Documentation.

Other 3rd party administrative tools

Many third-party tools are available for administering Red Hat JBoss A-MQ. Here are a few: