Starting the Web Console | JBoss: A Developers Notebook

Since you've already been using the JMX Console, we'll skip right to its big brother, the Web Console. The Web Console is really just the standard JMX Console you've been using, with the addition of an applet that provides a higher-level view of the server. Instead of showing the raw managed beans (MBeans), the Web Console provides multiple views into the server, giving you the ability to more quickly find things that interest you.

Note: The Web Console application is named consolemgr. sar, and you can find it in the deploy/management directory.

How do I do that?

The Web Console is a simple web application that lives under the web-console context root. To start it up, open your browser and go to http://localhost:8080/web-console/. The page loads a Java applet, and it can take a few seconds to completely start up. Once it does, you should see something pretty close to what is in Figure 8-1.

Developer's Notebook 8-1. Web Console main page

There are two sections to the application. The lefthand side is the navigation panel. Clicking most items in the navigation panel will bring up a details page on the right. Clicking the JBoss logo will load the status page shown in Figure 8-1. If you right-click the logo, you'll have the option to refresh the navigation panel and sync up with the server. You'll also find that the shutdown command is accessible from that menu.

The navigation panel provides four basic views into the system:

Monitors: The Monitors section provides a quick link to the alerts and snapshots you've created. Those will be empty now, but you'll see items there later, when we look at how to create them.
J2EE Domains: The J2EE Domains section shows all the deployed applications and services, organized by the name of the deployment package.

Note: AOP stands for aspect-oriented programming. AOP application deployment is one of the many non-J2EE services available in JBoss. For more information, see http://aop.jboss.org/.

AOP: The AOP section shows the status of the AOP-based applications currently deployed.
System: The System section shows all the MBeans in the system, organized by domain.

Take a minute to familiarize yourself with how the Web Console operates before moving on. We're going to be covering a lot of ground here.