Brewing in Beats: Monitor JMX metrics with Metricbeat

Welcome to the weekly Brewing in Beats ! With this weekly series, we are keeping you up to date with all the changes in Beats, including the latest commits, releases and other learning resources.

Metricbeat: Add support for Jolokia/JMX

You can use the new Jolokia module to gather arbitrary JMX metrics from your Java applications. Below is an example configuration:

- module: jolokia
  metricsets: ["jmx"]
  enabled: true
  period: 1s
  hosts: ["localhost:8778"]
  namespace: "metrics"
  jmx.mappings:
    - mbean: 'java.lang:type=Runtime'
      attributes:
        - attr: Uptime
          field: uptime
    - mbean: 'java.lang:type=GarbageCollector,name=ConcurrentMarkSweep'
      attributes:
        - attr: CollectionTime
          field: gc.cms_collection_time
        - attr: CollectionCount
          field: gc.cms_collection_count
    - mbean: 'java.lang:type=Memory'
      attributes:
        - attr: HeapMemoryUsage
          field: memory.heap_usage
        - attr: NonHeapMemoryUsage
          field: memory.non_heap_usage


For each mbean, you can define the attributes that should be fetched. The field defines the field name where the event will be placed. The namespace defines the metricset namespace.

Central monitoring for Beats

With the growing number of your deployed Beats, it comes the need to start monitoring the health of the Beats in a central point. Each Beat exports now a series of health metrics, and sends periodically a subset of them to x-pack monitoring to be later visualized. By default, the monitoring data is sent to the same Elasticsearch cluster, as configured under the outputs.

New community Beat: Mcqbeat

Mcqbeat reads periodically the status of queues from memcacheq, a simple queue service over Memcache, and stores it into Elasticsearch.

Other features and fixes

All Beats

  • Remove defaults from fields.common.yml for more flexibility #3602
  • Add monitoring utilities #3550

Filebeat

  • Remove an example with the Filebeat modules configuration from filebeat.yml #3587
  • Fix harvester shutdown for prospector reloading #3584
  • Filebeat modules: Fix generator files #3621