A while back I posted this question about monitoring a Tomcat server. Since that time I've played around a little bit and come up with a program that outputs a bunch of JMX information (MBeanServer names, MBean names, MBean attributes, their descriptions and values...) to a text file. This has been a great learning experience, but I'm having trouble wading through the considerable amount of information that I've generated to decide what is actually useful information to determine the health of the Tomcat server and the applications deployed on it. Can someone tell me what Tomcat MBean attributes describe a) the overall health of the Tomcat server and, b) the health of the webapps deployed on said server.
So, here is what I found out. All of the information I was getting initially was coming strictly from Tomcat MBeans. This information was useful to a point, but what I failed to realize was that there were other sorts of MBeans out there. I was able to uncover a lot of useful information by looking at RuntimeMXBeans, ThreadMXBeans and MemoryMXBeans.