3.6. Simplified Administration

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.

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).

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.

JBoss A-MQ provides several plug-ins for visualizing broker components and for retrieving statistics collected on a running broker.

For more information, see ActiveMQ in Action (Snyder, Bosanac, and Davies).

JBoss A-MQ provides extensive support for monitoring and controlling the broker's behavior from a JMX console, such as jConsole.

For details, see chapter "Using JMX" in "Managing and Monitoring a Broker".

The Web console is a browser-based administration tool used to monitor the status of the broker. Combined with JBoss A-MQ's JMX support, the Web Console displays the details about a broker, such as system usage, queues, topics and advisory messages, subscribers, connections and protocols, scheduled messages, delayed and scheduled deliveries, and so on.

For details, see section "Using the broker console" in "Managing and Monitoring a Broker".

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

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.

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