Inspired greatly by Gregor and Erik's great talk at TSSJS 2006 we've started to add some visualisation plugins into Apache ActiveMQ.

Connection visualisation

There is a <connectionDotFilePlugin/> broker plugin which generates a DOT file such as this example representing the connections, sessions, producers, consumers and the destinations they are using.

Destination visualisation

There is a <destinationDotFilePlugin/> broker plugin which generates a DOT file such as this example whenever a destination is created or destroyed in the broker. You can then turn this dot file into a nicely rendered image such as the one below.

A note for OS X users

If you are using OS X then you can open the DOT file using graphviz which will then automatically re-render if it changes, so you end up with a real time graphical representation of the topic and queue hierarchies.

Also if you want to edit the layout a little before adding it to a wiki to distribute to your team, open the DOT file with OmniGraffle then just edit away

Visualisation Wish List

There are so many different things we could visualise; our only limitation is our imagination. So if you have any ideas for what we could visualise please add something to our Visualisation Wish List

External Open Source Tools

• hawtio is an open source HTML5 web application for working with Apache ActiveMQ and Apache Camel. It lets you create topics/queues, browse queues or send messages to destinations as well as visualising Camel routes and working with Camel endpoints along with viewing logs and metric charting etc.
• Fuse IDE is an open source set of eclipse plugins for working with Apache ActiveMQ and Apache Camel. Its got tooling for runtime browsing of queues, creating topics/queues. You can drag and drop messages to/from ActiveMQ destinations and Camel endpoints