Discovery

The Discovery service enables you to discover Java Dynamic Management agents in a network. Only agents that have a discovery responder registered in their MBean server can be discovered using this service.

The Discovery service can be functionally divided into two parts:

• Discovery search service.

• Discovery support service.

Discovery search service

The Discovery Search service consists of a discovery client that initiates the discovery operation and a discovery responder, each instance of which supplies the return information about the agent in which it is registered. The return information is represented in the discovery client by a discovery response object.

The DiscoveryClient class provides methods to discover agents. The discovery operation is initiated by the discovery client that sends a discovery request to a multicast group and waits for responses. The agents must have a DiscoveryResponder registered in their MBean server in order to be found by the discovery service.

Discovery support service

The Discovery Support service enables you to monitor discovery responders in a multicast group. A DiscoveryMonitor object listens for discovery responder objects registering or deregistering in the multicast group. When the discovery monitor hears a discovery responder registering or deregistering, it sends a discovery responder notification to its listener. The notification is an instance of the Java class that implements the DiscoveryResponderNotification interface.

The DiscoveryMonitor is an MBean that listens for DiscoveryResponder objects registering or deregistering within a specific multicast group. A discovery responder listener is an instance of the Java class that implements the DiscoveryResponderListener interface. For example, it may be implemented to update a list of agents in the network.