WildFly monitoring in Zabbix

Zabbix is a fully featured open-source monitoring solution. I wanted to evaluate how easy it is to monitor an application server like WildFly.

Server Installation

First component to install is the server which also requires a database (PostgreSQL in my case). As it was already explained by Daniel’s blog, I will not go into too much details. For the server to be able to gather detailed information about WildFly, Zabbix requires a Java gateway. When Zabbix software repository is already setup, installation is easy:

dnf install zabbix-java-gateway

Java gateway will be a proxy to all JMX requests that Zabbix will send to JMX-enabled hosts.

Configuration file path for Java gateway is /etc/zabbix/zabbix_java_gateway.conf. For my installation, I did not need to modify this one, but the main zabbix configuration file: /etc/zabbix/zabbix_server.conf

I modified as follow:

• Uncomment line 8 and put IP of Java Gateway server (hosted on same server as Zabbix server).
• Uncomment line 16 and put port of Java Gateway. 10052 is the default port.
• Uncomment line 24 and put 5.

File content look like this (extract):

[...]
### Option: JavaGateway
#       IP address (or hostname) of Zabbix Java gateway.
#       Only required if Java pollers are started.
#
# Mandatory: no
# Default:
JavaGateway=<***.***.***.***>

### Option: JavaGatewayPort
#       Port that Zabbix Java gateway listens on.
#
# Mandatory: no
# Range: 1024-32767
# Default:
JavaGatewayPort=10052

### Option: StartJavaPollers
#       Number of pre-forked instances of Java pollers.
#
# Mandatory: no
# Range: 0-1000
# Default:
StartJavaPollers=5
[...]

For Java Gateway to connect to WildFly, it will require jboss-client.jar library. It can be found under bin/client in WildFly home directory and it must be copied in /usr/share/zabbix-java-gateway/lib/ on Zabbix server.

A zabbix-server service restart is required for configuration changes to be taken into account and a restart of zabbix-java-gateway service for new library.

Add JMX Host

During my previous tests of Zabbix, I already added a host with a Zabbix agent into the configuration. Now, I want to add WildFly monitoring which will be done by a adding JMX interface. I need to go in hosts list and edit the host:

As you can see, I have added an extra template named WildFly Server by JMX as well as a JMX interface to my existing host. The port corresponds to WildFly management port.

Next, we need to define macros (ie. variables) for Java Gateway to connect to WildFly:

• {$WILDFLY.JMX.PROTOCOL}
• {$WILDFLY.PASSWORD}
• {$WILDFLY.USER}

Finally, I click update.

After few seconds and a refresh, I can see that JMX interface become green as well:

After one more minute, I see new problems raised concerning datasource: They did not have statistics enabled. For that, I just need to enable that in WildFly configuration:

Likewise for Web subsystem Undertow:

After that, I can plot a graph for Request per second:

Note that provided template will only get metrics for http and not https as per discovery rule definition: jboss.as:subsystem=undertow,server=,http-listener=*

This comes from selected template. We could either create our own template or modify existing template, but this is another topic.