Remote Profiling of JBoss using VisualVM

I ran into an issue while trying to setup profiling (using VisualVM) of a remote JBoss server instance. It turns out that the default steps I have found on the internet, assume that your target server (Where JBoss is running on) is accessible via the hostname not only by IP address. Well, just in case you live in an environment where you can access your server via IP but not via hostname, this blog post may hopefully save you an hour googling the solution. In order to setup remote profiling I did:

To my run.conf file (JBoss/bin) I added:

JAVA_OPTS="$JAVA_OPTS -Xdebug -Xrunjdwp:transport=dt_socket,address=8787,server=y,suspend=n"
JAVA_OPTS="$JAVA_OPTS -Dcom.sun.management.jmxremote.port=6789"
JAVA_OPTS="$JAVA_OPTS -Dcom.sun.management.jmxremote.ssl=false"
JAVA_OPTS="$JAVA_OPTS -Dcom.sun.management.jmxremote.authenticate=false"
JAVA_OPTS="$JAVA_OPTS -Djava.rmi.server.hostname=IP_ADDRESS_OF_MY_JBOSS"

Particularly, the last line was very important. Without it I was able to telnet to port 6789, thinking everything is cool, however I was unable to connect to it via VisualVM. This missing line caused a few frustrations.

Anyway, once these lines were added, you need to configure jstatd. I created a policy file (I called it tools.policy) for the JVM containing:

grant {
  permission java.security.AllPermission;
};

Then, I would be able to start up jstatd:

jstatd -p 1099 -J-Djava.security.policy=tools.policy

And finally, I was able to startup JBoss and connect to my server from VisualVM.