About AMX

This section describes the Application Server Management eXtensions (AMX). AMX is an API that exposes all of the Application Server configuration and monitoring MBeans as easy-to-use client-side dynamic proxies implementing the AMX interfaces.

Full API documentation for the AMX API is provided in the following Application Server package:

com.sun.appserv.management

The Application Server is based around the concept of administration domains, which consist of one or more managed resources. A managed resource can be an Application Server instance, a cluster of such instances, or a manageable entity within a server instance. A managed resource is of a particular type, and each resource type exposes a set of attributes and administrative operations that change the resource’s state.

Managed resources are exposed as JMX management beans, or MBeans. While the MBeans can be accessed via standard JMX APIs (for example, MBeanServerConnection), most users find the use of the AMX client-side dynamic proxies much more convenient.

All the vital components of the Application Server are visible for monitoring and management via AMX. You can use third-party tools to perform all common administrative tasks programmatically, based on the JMX and JMX Remote API standards.

The AMX API consists of a set of proxy interfaces. MBeans are registered in the JMX runtime contained in the Domain Administration Server (DAS). AMX provides routines to obtain proxies for MBeans, starting with a root-level domain MBean.

You can navigate generically through the MBean hierarchy using the com.sun.appserv.management.base.Container interface. When using AMX, the interfaces defined are implemented by client-side dynamic proxies, but they also implicitly define the MBeanInfo that is made available by the MBean or MBeans corresponding to it. Certain operations defined in the interface might have a different return type or a slightly different name when accessed through the MBean directly. This results from the fact that direct access to JMX requires the use of ObjectName, whereas use of the AMX interfaces is via strongly typed proxies implementing the interface(s).