Troubleshooting VisualVM Remote Connections

I was trying to use VisualVM to monitor the memory usage of a build job on our build server. According to the documentation, this should require nothing but a jstatd daemon running on the remote machine.

For some reason, I could not see any remote applications in my local VisualVM. It was not a port issue, all the required ports were reachable via telnet.

Googling around, this article finally gave my the important clue: Our network does not have consistent DNS names, so I had to connect to the remote machine via IP address. Setting the java.rmi.server.hostname property for jstatd to the IP address solved the problem.

Summary

On the remote machine

Create policy file for jstatd

grant codebase "file:${java.home}/../lib/tools.jar" {
    permission java.security.AllPermission;
};

Start jstatd with this hostname file and the IP address as hostname

jstatd -J-Djava.security.policy=jstatd.all.policy -J-Djava.rmi.server.hostname=192.168.0.123

On the local machine

Start jvisualvm and add a Remote Host with the given IP address. A jstatd connection will be established by default. You should now see your remote applications.