How to connect JConsole to WAS 7

(updated )

Update: To make your life easier you may want to use the VisualWAS plugin for VisualVM instead of trying to connect JConsole to WebSphere as described in this post. VisualVM supports all the features that JConsole has, and the VisualWAS plugin makes it very easy to connect VisualVM to WebSphere. The VisualWAS project also provides an extension for WebSphere that makes the platform MXBeans available in WebSphere’s MBean server, so that memory, CPU and GC information can be visualized.

It’s a bit tricky, but it’s perfectly possible to connect (Sun’s) JConsole to a remote WAS7 instance without any special server setup. You will only need to add a couple of JARs from the WAS runtime to JConsole’s classpath. Also, the JMX URL to use is a bit special. Here is a Batch script for Windows that you can use as a starting point:

set JAVA_HOME=c:\Program Files\java\jdk1.6.0_17
set WAS_HOME=c:\IBM\WebSphere\AppServer
set CP=%JAVA_HOME%\lib\jconsole.jar
set CP=%CP%;%WAS_HOME%\runtimes\com.ibm.ws.admin.client_7.0.0.jar
set CP=%CP%;%WAS_HOME%\runtimes\com.ibm.ws.ejb.thinclient_7.0.0.jar
set CP=%CP%;%WAS_HOME%\runtimes\com.ibm.ws.orb_7.0.0.jar
set HOST=localhost
set PORT=9100<br />"%JAVA_HOME%\bin\jconsole" -J-Djava.class.path="%CP%" ^
        service:jmx:iiop://%HOST%:%PORT%/jndi/JMXConnector

PORT must be set to the ORB_LISTENER_ADDRESS in the WebSphere configuration.