What do we need?

• JMXtrans: provided by this image
• A backend such as Graphite: I recommend using nickstenning/graphite.

How to build the image

$ git clone https://github.com/chtefi/jmxtrans-docker
$ cd jmxtrans-docker
$ docker build -t chtefi/jmxtrans:latest .

We can see our new image:

$ docker images chtefi/jmxtrans
REPOSITORY          TAG                 IMAGE ID            CREATED             SIZE
chtefi/jmxtrans     latest              c17b9838505c        5 hours ago         178 MB

The image provides 2 volumes (and does not expose any port):

• /opt/jmxtrans/conf
• /opt/jmxtrans/logs (optional)

Start the containers

It seems JMXTrans has trouble if Graphite is not available at first (no retry logic?), so we'll start with Graphite.

Start Graphite + Carbon.

This image exposes 4 ports but only 2 are interesting for us: 80 for the interface, and 2003 to send our metrics.

$ docker run -p 8080:80 -p 2003:2003 -d nickstenning/graphite

If we connect to http://localhost:8080/, we can see the Graphite UI without metrics, a few seconds later, some carbon metrics will appears (automatic).

Graphite provides the visual dashboards and Carbon provides the storage piece (port 2003).

Start our JMXTrans image.

• We need to provide some conf by mounting the volumne /opt/jmxtrans/conf.
• We can also mount the volume /opt/jmxtrans/log to get the logs (optional).

There is a default configuration provided in the repo (jmxtrans_conf) but it won't probably fit your case: it is listening to 192.168.0.11:9010 to grab JMX data: you probably need to change that to your IP:port.

To get some generic JMX data, we can run a Java program with these options:

-Dcom.sun.management.jmxremote.port=9010 \
-Dcom.sun.management.jmxremote.authenticate=false \
-Dcom.sun.management.jmxremote.ssl=false

Note that JMXTrans will pull data from JMX every 10s (configured in the image command itself).

$ ls jmxtrans_conf
jmxtrans.conf
$ docker run -d --name jmxtrans -v c:/tmp/jmxtrans-docker/jmxtrans_log:/opt/jmxtrans/log \
                                -v c:/tmp/jmxtrans-docker/jmxtrans_conf:/opt/jmxtrans/conf \
                                chtefi/jmxtrans

If the configuration is all right (we can know by looking at the logs if we mount the volume), we can now look at Graphite.

About JMXTrans configuration

You'll notice I've added "flushStrategy": "always" to the output writer because while testing, my metrics were never flushed, thus Graphite was always empty. In production, that should not be necessary.