Bastion

Permanent Article Link

There was an old woman who lived in a shoe
She had so many MBeans she didn’t know what to do
– With apologies to Mother Goose

It’s hard to deny that MBeans are incredibly useful for accessing configuration and runtime data. But with so many MBeans in an application server, it’s also incredibly hard to find the needle in the haystack.

Whether you’re looking for an MBean type, a particular attribute, or the bean that goes along with a known value (domain name, for example), how do you quickly find it? I’ve already posted one trick I use for finding MBeans via the audit log. In this post, I’ll show you my bestest trick of all for finding WebLogic MBeans. I’d like to fancy myself as an Evil Genius(TM) but it’s actually quite obvious. Here we go…

The weblogic.Admin utility has several commands such as GET and QUERY. You can find MBeans by type, name, or name pattern which is useful if you already have an idea of what you want. The following command uses weblogic.Admin to print all MBeans and their attributes to the command console:

java weblogic.Admin -username weblogic -password weblogic -url t3://localhost:80 query -pretty -pattern *:*

Substitute your username, password, and URL and you’ll get a ton of output. Here’s a representative snippet:

MBeanName: "Security:Name=myrealmDefaultAuthenticator"
	ControlFlag: REQUIRED
	Description: WebLogic Authentication Provider
	EnableGroupMembershipLookupHierarchyCaching: false
	GroupHierarchyCacheTTL: 60
	GroupMembershipSearching: unlimited
	MaxGroupHierarchiesInCache: 100
	MaxGroupMembershipSearchLevel: 0
	MinimumPasswordLength: 8
	ProviderClassName: weblogic.security.providers. \
authentication.DefaultAuthenticationProviderImpl
	Realm: Security:Name=myrealm
	SupportedExportConstraints: users|groups
	SupportedExportFormats: DefaultAtn
	SupportedImportConstraints:
	SupportedImportFormats: DefaultAtn
	UseRetrievedUserNameAsPrincipal: false
	Version: 1.0

By the way, if you’ve never used weblogic.Admin before, you must first run the setEnv (or setDomainEnv) script in your domain directory to set up environment variables and paths.

Now, that output is all well and good but it might not make finding things any easier. Time for a little redirection, my friend:

java weblogic.Admin -username weblogic -password weblogic -url t3://localhost:80 query -pretty -pattern *:* > MBeans.txt

This time, the output goes into the MBeans.txt file. You can use this file to do automated searches. When you search, you’ll get MBean names, attribute names, and attribute values. Wanna search with RegEx? More power to you! <evil-genius>Muuwhaahaaaahaaa!</evil-genius>

Anyway, like I said, it’s fairly obvious but very useful. Mother Goose’s old woman would be proud of how we spanked those MBeans soundly and sent them to bed.

Epilogue

weblogic.Admin was deprecated in WebLogic 9. It’s still there and works, but it’s being phased out in favor of WLST. I don’t know of a quick way to use WLST to dump MBeans to a file. However, WLST is clearly powerful enough to write a script that does it. I haven’t pursued a solution in WLST because I cheat and use the deprecated weblogic.Admin to dump MBeans to a file. Please don’t tell…

If anyone knows how to use WLST to the same effect, please post a comment and share the solution with everyone. Thanks!