Better Diagnosis for ActiveMQ

Over the last couple of weeks I was involved in a number of projects where we had to understand how messages are being handled within an ActiveMQ broker. Browsing the ActiveMQ code I found the LoggingBrokerPlugin that did some rudimentary logging upon message sends.

That seemed to be a good point to have a little enhancement to ActiveMQ itself. ActiveMQ basically provides a framework for writing plugins that can hook into the message processing within the broker. Usually such a plugin extends the BrokerFilter class.

As there is a whole lot of events it made sense to categorize the events into certain classes to prevent the log files being flooded with unnecessary information. I have finally contributed a patch to ActiveMQ that provides this kind of functionality.

In a nutshell, the plugin can be attached to the broker via the normal ActiveMQ XML configuration :

<beans> <broker usejmx="true" deleteallmessagesonstartup="true" xmlns="http://activemq.org/config/1.0"> <transportconnectors> <transportconnector uri="tcp://localhost:61616" /> </transportconnectors> <plugins> <loggingbrokerplugin logconnectionevents="true" /> </plugins> </broker> </beans>

With the configuration above and a logger assigned to org.apache.activemq.broker.util.LoggingBrokerPlugin in the log4j settings you will
see log entries whenever a JMS client connects to or disconnects from the broker and when a session is created/closed by these clients. Other
event classes include transaction events, consumer events and producer events. The internal event group is some kind of a catch all group
that produces log entries for methods that are only of interest for debugging.

As a side note, the methods in the plugin also provide excellent entry points for debugging in to the broker behavior.