jmxterm is a nice command line JMX client —17 May 2012
Suppose you have exposed some mbeans using JMX. You can connect to the JMX service like this:
java -jar jmxterm.jar --url $service_url
where service_url is the URL of the JMX service, which you can usually find out in the logs when starting up your service. In my case, working in a Camel container, it looks like this:
service:jmx:rmi:///jndi/rmi://localhost:1188/jmxrmi/camel
Next you need to find the bean you want to manipulate, you can search for available beans with the beans command. To narrow down the list, it is helpful to specify the domain of the bean, for example:
beans -d net.sf.ehcache
Next, to do something with the bean you need to select it with the bean command, for example:
bean -d net.sf.ehcache $bean
run someMethodOfTheBean
where bean is the full name of the bean as you found previously with the beans command. It’s pretty long, so you definitely want to copy & paste rather than typing.
You can put this commands in text file and run them non-interactively like this:
java -jar jmxterm.jar --url $service_url -i /path/to/my-jmx.script
You can get jmxterm from here, with good documentation:
http://wiki.cyclopsgroup.org/jmxterm
If you need a GUI tool, VisualVM (the official tool by Sun) is fantastic.
I actually blogged about that a while back: