8.4.4.2. Verifying a Network of ActiveMQ Brokers Using the ActiveMQ Console

Confirm that the authentication is working with the following command:

# curl --head --user admin:password http://localhost:8161/admin/xml/topics.jsp

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
[...]

A response of 200 means authentication is working correctly.

As shown in the following example, a basic response is expected when requesting topics.

# curl --user admin:password --silent http://localhost:8161/admin/xml/topics.jsp

<topics>
</topics>

The topics are empty at this time because there is no messaging traffic.

With all ActiveMQ brokers running, use the console for each ActiveMQ broker to verify that they are communicating with each other. Because the console is only exposed on localhost, use a text browser such as elinks to verify locally. Alternatively, connect to your workstation using a secure tunnel and use a browser of your choice, as shown in the following example:

# ssh -L8161:localhost:8161 activemq1.example.com

After connecting to your workstation, use the browser of your choice to navigate to http://localhost:8161/. The password from the /etc/activemq/jetty-realm.properties file is required.

The Network tab at http://localhost:8161/admin/network.jsp shows two connections for each server on the network. For example, for a three broker network from the first server, it may be similar to the following example.

                                                     Created  Messages  Messages
  Remote Broker                Remote Address          By     Enqueued  Dequeued
                                                     Duplex
  activemq2.example.com   tcp://192.168.59.163:61616 false    15        15
  activemq3.example.com   tcp://192.168.59.147:61616 false    15        15

The example shows duplex connections. The connection to port 61616 is an outgoing connection to remote hosts, while the other connections are incoming and used as ephemeral ports on remote hosts. If you only see one connection for a host, verify which host was to receive the missing connection. Then confirm that the firewall settings on that particular host allow connections to port 61616. If both outgoing and incoming connections are missing from a host, then most likely the ActiveMQ service failed to start on that host, or the service has crashed.