Monitor and administer Apache Tomcat with Lambda Probe

If you want to monitor and administer web applications that’re running inside Apache Tomcat you should have a look at Lambda Probe: it’s a small WAR that can be dropped inside your Tomcat instance and once you’ve done that you can use it to perform administrative tasks.

Installation

The installation for Lambda Probe is pretty easy: download probe.war and copy it to $CATALINA_HOME/webapps/.

Once you’ve done that make sure that the user tomcat has the role manager. Have a look at your tomcat-users.xml file:

<tomcat-users>
  <role rolename="manager"/>
  <role rolename="poweruser"/>
  <role rolename="poweruserplus"/>
  <role rolename="probeuser"/>
  <user name="tomcat" password="tomcat" roles="manager" />
</tomcat-users>

You can use the other roles to configure access to Lambda Probe. Have a look at this page if you want to do that.

If you want to have a look at the memory graphs and everything JMX related you’ll have to enable JMX Remote. This comes down to these lines:

export CATALINA_OPTS="-Dcom.sun.management.jmxremote \
       -Dcom.sun.management.jmxremote.port=9080 \
       -Dcom.sun.management.jmxremote.ssl=false \
       -Dcom.sun.management.jmxremote.authenticate=false"

That’s it. Now you’re ready to use Lambda Probe.

Conclusion

If you want to monitor and administer web applications inside Apache Tomcat, Lambda Probe seems to be a very nice solution. I recommend to definitely give it a try.