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Monitor and administer Apache Tomcat with Lambda Probe

January 16th, 2008 | Tech

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.

11 comments ↓

  • Bertrand Gourraud says:
    October 7, 2008 at 10:26 am
    Hello,

    I really want to give a try to Lambda probe but unfortunately the Lambda probe web site seems to be unavailable. Do you know another location where I could download this tool?
    Thanks,
    Bertrand.

  • Lawrence says:
    October 7, 2008 at 3:25 pm
    If you want the application then send me a mail and I will send you a link where you can download it from.

    Lawrence

  • Claus Seitter says:
    October 13, 2008 at 11:02 am
    Hi,
    could you please send me a link where to download the war (and the sources) after lambdaprobe.org has vanished ?
    Thanx a lot!
  • Naresh says:
    October 14, 2008 at 8:32 pm
    Could you also send me the link where to download the war file from?

    Thank you so much.

  • Régis says:
    October 16, 2008 at 11:00 am
    Hello,

    Could you send me the link to download the war file ?
    Very big thanks

  • Robin Mannering says:
    October 20, 2008 at 4:02 pm
    Hello,

    Could you also send me the same link. Their site still seems unreachable. Many thanks for your time
    Robin

  • Christian Schenk says:
    October 20, 2008 at 9:44 pm
    Hi everybody,

    lambdaprobe.org is up and you can download the WAR and the source code again.

  • Ahsan says:
    February 24, 2009 at 5:21 pm
    can any body share the documentation for the lembda probe ,
  • David says:
    March 18, 2009 at 11:36 am
    Just for information, when setting -Dcom.sun.management.jmxremote.authenticate=false could be acceptable on test/dev servers, it is pretty unsecure for production. Read this.
  • Christian Schenk says:
    March 18, 2009 at 12:24 pm
    Hi David,
    thanks you for the hint, I’ll integrate it into the article. Nevertheless, I wrote these instructions for the impatient ;)
  • Kai says:
    April 14, 2009 at 8:41 am
    Hi Christian, thank you for the instruction, and I hope you don’t mind me asking a question here. I followed the instruction from above (and reference a few others), download the .war file and put it in D:\Tomcat 6.0\webapps\probe.war . Then I modified the D:\Tomcat 6.0\conf\tomcat-users.xml by adding a user named “tomcat” and assigned it the manager right. I restarted the Apache Tomcat service, then it returns a http 404 error. the requested source is not available. is there anything that I’d done wrong that makes the site unable to display? Thank you very much

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