GlassFish Sessions Test

To understand how much load is imposed by user sessions on each of the web applications deployed on the GlassFish server, and to determine the nature (eg., persisted sessions, rejected sessions, etc.) and the current state of these sessions (whether activated, passivated, created, etc.), use the GlassFish Sessions test. This way, the most popular web applications on the server can be isolated, and those applications that reject sessions too often can be identified.

Target of the test : A GlassFish server

Agent deploying the test : An internal/remote agent

Outputs of the test : One set of results for each web application deployed on the GlassFish Enterprise server being monitored.

Configurable parameters for the test
Parameters	Description
Test Period	How often should the test be executed.
Host	The host for which the test is to be configured.
Port	The port number at which the specified host listens
JMX Remote Port	To collect metrics from a GlassFish Enterprise server, the eG agent monitoring that server should be configured to use JMX to connect to the JRE used by the server and pull out the metrics of interest. By default, JMX support is enabled for the JRE used by the GlassFish Enterprise Server. The JMX connector listens on port 8686 by default. Therefore, type 8686 as the JMX Remote Port. If JMX listens on a different port in your environment, then specify the same here. To know the port at which JMX listens, open the domain.xml file in the <GLASSFISH_INSTALL_DIR>\Sun\AppServer\domains\domain1\config directory and look for the code block shown below: <jmx-connector accept-all="false" address="0.0.0.0" auth-realm-name="admin-realm" enabled="true" name="system" port="8686" protocol="rmi_jrmp" security-enabled="false"> The port number specified against the Port parameter in the code block above refers to the JMX Remote Port.
JMX User, JMX Password, and Confirm Password	By default, the JMX connector on the GlassFish Enterprise Server requires authentication. To enable the eG agent to use JMX therefore, you need to configure the agent with the credentials of a user who is authorized to use JMX. Typically, the GlassFish administrator has the right to use JMX. You can hence configure the JMX User and JMX Password parameters with the credentials of the administrator. However, if you prefer not to expose the credentials of an administrator owing to security considerations, you can use the credentials of any other user with access rights to JMX. To know the name of such a user, open the domain.xml file in the <GLASSFISH_INSTALL_DIR>\Sun\AppServer\domains\domain1\config directory and look for the code block shown below: <jmx-connector accept-all="false" address="0.0.0.0" auth-realm-name="admin-realm" enabled="true" name="system" port="8686" protocol="rmi_jrmp" security-enabled="false"> The user name specified against the auth-realm-name parameter in the code block above can be configured as the JMX User, and the Password of that user can be specified against JMX Password. Confirm the JMX Password you specify by retyping that password in the Confirm Password text box.
JNDIName	The JNDIName is a lookup name for connecting to the JMX connector. By default, this is jmxrmi. If you have registered the JMX connector in the RMI registry using a different lookup name, then you can change this default value to reflect the same.
JMX Provider	This test uses a JMX Provider to access the MBean attributes of the GlassFish Enterprise server and collect metrics. Specify the package name of this JMX Provider here. By default, this is set to com.sun.jmx.remote.protocol.
Timeout	Specify the duration (in seconds) for which this test should wait for a response from the GlassFish Enterprise server. If there is no response from the server beyond the configured duration, the test will timeout. By default, this is set to 240 seconds.

Measurements made by the test
Measurement	Description	Measurement Unit	Interpretation
Current active sessions	Indicates the number of sessions that are currently active on this application.	Number	This is a good indicator of the current workload of the application. You can compare the value of this measure across applications to know which applications is the most popular in terms of the number of user sessions open on it.
Activated sessions	Indicates the number of sessions to this application that were activated during the last measurement period.	Number
Passivated sessions	Indicates the number of sessions to this application that were passivated during the last measurement period.	Number
Expired sessions	Indicates the number of sessions to this application that expired during the last measurement period.	Number	This measure indicates the number of sessions that remained inactive on the application for a duration in excess of the session-timeout value configured at the web application level. If the value of this measure is unreasonably high, you may want to increase the session-timeout value, so as to minimize the frequency of session expiry. If the session-timeout value is set to 0 or less, then sessions to that web application will never expire.
Persisted sessions	Indicates the number of sessions to this application that persisted during the last measurement period.	Number	GlassFish Server provides high availability session persistence through failover of HTTP session data and stateful session bean (SFSB) session data. Failover means that in the event of a server instance or hardware failure, another server instance in a cluster takes over a distributed session.
Rejected sessions	Indicates the number of sessions to this application that were rejected during the last measurement period.	Number	A low value is desired for this measure.
Sessions created	Indicates the number of sessions to this application that were created during the last measurement period.	Number	A session manager automatically creates new session objects whenever a new session starts.