Nagios / Icinga Plugin for Liferay Portal via JMX

Liferay Config

First configure your JMX credentials in Liferay Portal via $CATALINA_OPTS variable in $TOMCAT_HOME/bin/setenv.sh (and restart your Liferay service):

CATALINA_OPTS="$CATALINA_OPTS -Dcom.sun.management.jmxremote=true"
CATALINA_OPTS="$CATALINA_OPTS -Dcom.sun.management.jmxremote.port=6666"
CATALINA_OPTS="$CATALINA_OPTS -Dcom.sun.management.jmxremote.authenticate=true"
CATALINA_OPTS="$CATALINA_OPTS -Dcom.sun.management.jmxremote.ssl=false"
CATALINA_OPTS="$CATALINA_OPTS -Dcom.sun.management.jmxremote.password.file=/opt/liferay/jmxremote.password"
CATALINA_OPTS="$CATALINA_OPTS -Dcom.sun.management.jmxremote.access.file=/opt/liferay/jmxremote.access"
CATALINA_OPTS="$CATALINA_OPTS -Djava.rmi.server.hostname=tomcat.zylk.net"

You should be able to connect and check JMX objects with Jconsole, VisualVM or JMXTerm.

Nagios/Icinga Config

In Nagios/Icinga server, copy next two files to your Nagios plugin directory.

• check_jmx (Copy to /usr/lib/nagios/plugins/ - or your plugins directory)
• check_jmx.jar (Copy to /usr/lib/nagios/plugins/ - or your plugins directory)

Then, add Liferay command definitions in Nagios plugin configuration directory.

• /etc/icinga/objects/liferay-commands.cfg

define command {
        command_name check_jmx_HeapMemoryUsage_Used
        command_line /usr/lib/nagios/plugins/check_jmx -U service:jmx:rmi:///jndi/rmi://$HOSTADDRESS$:$ARG1$/jmxrmi -O java.lang:type=Memory -A HeapMemoryUsage -K used -username "$ARG2$" -password "$ARG3$" -w "$ARG4$" -c "$ARG5$"
}

define host{
        host_name           tomcat
        alias               tomcat
        address             tomcat.zylk.net
        parents             helios
        use                 generic-host
}

define service {
        use                 generic-service
        host_name           tomcat
        service_description JVM Heap Memory Used
        check_command       check_jmx_HeapMemoryUsage_Used!9999!zylk!secret!750000000!800000000
}

Finally, configure you Liferay host and services to configure.

• /etc/icinga/objects/hosts-icinga.cfg
• /etc/icinga/objects/services-icinga.cfg

Direct monitoring examples

Some basics in Liferay Monitoring are:

• JVM Heap Used

• Thread Pool

  • maxThreads (static): This attribute tells us how many maximum threads are configured. By default, 200 in our Tomcat setup.
  • currentThreadCount : This attribute tells about how many threads are created (including busy threads and idle threads)
  • currentThreadsBusy : This attribute tells us how many threads are busy in serving requests.

• Database Pool: There are many attributes exposed by the database connection pool MBean. The following are some of the basics

  • maxPoolSize (static): This attribute tells us the maximum number of connections that can be created in a database connection pool.
  • numBusyConnections : This attribute tells us how many database connections are in use by Liferay server.
  • numConnections : This attribute tells us how many connections are created in the database connection pool (busy and idle connections).

They are included in liferay-command.cfg as examples.

NRPE configuration

Sometimes it is better for security considerations run JMX locally and use NRPE protocol for monitoring.

In your server, you need something like (for Ubuntu):

$ sudo apt-get install nagios-plugins nagios-nrpe-server

adding the provided NRPE commands in /etc/nagios/nrpe.cfg or similar, allowing to your Nagios server to connect via NRPE protocol to Liferay Server. The new configuration for NRPE services is done in Nagios Server too. Check the example commands under nrpe folder.

Tested Setup

• Liferay 6.2
• Nagios/Icinga 3

Authors

• Gustavo Fernandez
• Cesar Capillas

Links

• http://www.zylk.net/en/web-2-0/blog/-/blogs/monitorizando-liferay-portal-con-nagios (Blog Post - Spanish)
• https://exchange.nagios.org/directory/Plugins/Java-Applications-and-Servers/Syabru-Nagios-JMX-Plugin/details
• https://snippets.syabru.ch/nagios-jmx-plugin/download.html
• https://github.com/toniblyx/alfresco-nagios-and-icinga-plugin