Tomcat-hosted WAR?

[rrix]

Hello hello. I've joined a team that recently migrated from an on-premises setup for our single-instance tomcat application where we had jconsole, etc working fine. In moving to AWS, the application has been containerized and deployed with AWS App Runner, which abstracts away load balancer, security group, instance configuration, etc, and in the process makes it impossible to access an instance's ports directly.

We looked at some options for exporting JMX stats to an observability stack, and jmx_exporter gets us close except that it cannot be hosted by Tomcat on the same port as the application, it wants to bind its own port.

Is there a WAR distribution of jmx_exporter or a similar way to get the exporter to run side-by-side with our application? I almost wrote a servlet which opens a connection to localhost:$JMX_EXPORTER_PORT and proxy the result, but we punted on that and decided to emit custom logs to cloudwatch and extract the stats in to custom metrics, but maintaining those filter patterns, etc, is not something I am looking forward to.

[dhoard]

To work around the AWS App Runner constraint, you can use OpenTelemetry mode and push the metrics to an OpenTelemetry endpoint.

[rrix]

thanks, that makes sense, i always forget about having push telemetry options after burning my hand on the prometheus push gateway too many years. :) we might revisit this in the future, i've been using cloudwatch custom logs for a few weeks and it's fairly stable.