Introduction

This guide is meant to help in the construction of new dashboads and dashboard components. These features allow one to customize and extend MC4J to create new ways of looking at and managing systems.

Custom views can be created for the features built into specific servers like JBoss or WebSphere. Views can also be created for custom components running withing those servers.

What is a dashboard?

A dashboard is a custom view of one or more MBeans that can be viewed through JMX. This custom view is meant to be flexible and customizable while also providing a rich interface to the underlying functionality. MC4J constructs the Swing components that make up a dashboard by parsing an XML file that defines its layout and properties. The following sections will describe the creation and customization of those files as well as the special components that they use.

The capabilities of a dashboard should be anything that is possible within the framework of JMX. This should include reading or updating attributes, executing operations and listening for notifications. All of these typical jmx operations are done through the MC4J node framework in which an MBean is represented by an object that can execute these features on behalf of a dashboard.

If you create interesting or useful dashboards for any of the major servers or services, please consider donating them back for all to use.

Dashboard XML

[Dashboard Component Reference]