When JMX Is Overkill, Build a Lightweight Monitoring Framework

evelopers often need to monitor a set of applications and perform recovery measures in the event of a failure. In my case, I had to design a monitoring server for a multi-tier telecom backend comprised of several components distributed across multiple operating systems. I found JMX solutions to be overkill for my requirements, so I decided to implement a lightweight Java framework that could be easily extended and customized to build a monitoring system.

This article shows how to use this framework to not only monitor various backend processes like database, application, and Web servers, but also to invoke corrective actions such as relaunching the process, executing disk cleanup when disk usage thresholds are exceeded, and reporting or logging failures. You can download the framework source and sample client here.