(This is an update of this blog written in 2016: Making Use of Payara Server's Monitoring Service)

Payara Server has for a while now included a JMX Monitoring Service which can be used to log information from MBeans to the server log. Using the JMX Monitoring Service, you can monitor information about the JVM runtime such as heap memory usage and threading, as well as more detailed information about the running Payara Server instance. The information is logged as a series of key-value pairs prefixed with the string PAYARA-MONITORING:, making it easy to filter the output using tools such as Logstash or fluentd.

JConsole is a useful tool for monitoring Java processes. You can collect data from a Java process such as: heap memory usage, thread count, CPU usage, classes loaded and MBean data. This allows you to gauge whether any Java process is using too much system resources. This guide will show you how to monitor Payara as a local process (on the same machine), or a remote process. This blog will assume that you've got a valid JDK and Payara install.

Did You Know?

In the fourth part of our continuing series on alternatives for commercial Oracle GlassFish features we are looking at the JMX Monitoring Service & the Payara HealthCheck Service as possible replacements for Oracle's Monitoring Scripting Client.