Error when starting Mule-ESB Mx4j agent in WebSphere 7 - spring

Question

I'm trying to use an Mx4j agent (and Spring Framework 3.0.5) to expose some POJOs in my Mule-ESB (Mule 3.1.2) application as an HTTP service. The agent is configured in mule-config.xml as follows:
<management:jmx-mx4j-adaptor jmxAdaptorUrl="http://0.0.0.0:9990" />
Also, I use the Spring MBeanExporter to expose the desired POJOs:
<bean id="exporter" class="org.springframework.jmx.export.MBeanExporter">
<property name="assembler" ref="assembler" />
<property name="namingStrategy" ref="namingStrategy" />
<property name="autodetect" value="true" />
</bean>
<bean id="jmxAttributeSource" class="org.springframework.jmx.export.annotation.AnnotationJmxAttributeSource" />
<bean id="assembler" class="org.springframework.jmx.export.assembler.MetadataMBeanInfoAssembler">
<property name="attributeSource" ref="jmxAttributeSource" />
</bean>
<bean id="namingStrategy" class="org.springframework.jmx.export.naming.MetadataNamingStrategy">
<property name="attributeSource" ref="jmxAttributeSource" />
</bean>
Everything works fine in my desktop environment, which runs in Jetty. When I deploy the EAR to our WebSphere 7 Server, however, the application doesn't start, raising the following exception:
[3/30/12 16:33:58:858 BRT] 00000038 webapp I com.ibm.ws.webcontainer.webapp.WebApp log SRVE0296E: [BaseApp#BaseApp.war][/context][Servlet.LOG]:.Failed to invoke lifecycle phase "start" on object: org.mule.module.management.agent.Mx4jAgent#13ef13ef:.org.mule.api.lifecycle.LifecycleException: Failed to invoke lifecycle phase "start" on object: org.mule.module.management.agent.Mx4jAgent#13ef13ef
at org.mule.lifecycle.phases.DefaultLifecyclePhase.applyLifecycle(DefaultLifecyclePhase.java:236)
at org.mule.lifecycle.RegistryLifecycleManager$RegistryLifecycleCallback.onTransition(RegistryLifecycleManager.java:276)
...
...
Caused by: org.mule.module.management.agent.JmxManagementException: Failed to start Mx4j agent
at org.mule.module.management.agent.Mx4jAgent.start(Mx4jAgent.java:205)
at sun.reflect.NativeMethodAccessorImpl.invoke0(Native Method)
at sun.reflect.NativeMethodAccessorImpl.invoke(NativeMethodAccessorImpl.java:60)
at sun.reflect.DelegatingMethodAccessorImpl.invoke(DelegatingMethodAccessorImpl.java:37)
at java.lang.reflect.Method.invoke(Method.java:611)
at org.mule.lifecycle.phases.DefaultLifecyclePhase.applyLifecycle(DefaultLifecyclePhase.java:225)
... 67 more
Caused by: javax.management.InstanceNotFoundException: Mule.BaseApp.6:name=Mx4jHttpAdapter
at java.lang.Throwable.<init>(Throwable.java:67)
at com.sun.jmx.interceptor.DefaultMBeanServerInterceptor.getMBean(DefaultMBeanServerInterceptor.java:1094)
at com.sun.jmx.interceptor.DefaultMBeanServerInterceptor.getMBeanInfo(DefaultMBeanServerInterceptor.java:1384)
at com.sun.jmx.mbeanserver.JmxMBeanServer.getMBeanInfo(JmxMBeanServer.java:892)
at com.ibm.ws.management.AdminServiceImpl.getMBeanInfo(AdminServiceImpl.java:1524)
at com.ibm.ws.management.AdminServiceImpl.checkForOpDeprecation(AdminServiceImpl.java:2662)
at com.ibm.ws.management.AdminServiceImpl.preInvoke(AdminServiceImpl.java:2284)
at com.ibm.ws.management.AdminServiceImpl$1.run(AdminServiceImpl.java:1309)
at com.ibm.ws.security.util.AccessController.doPrivileged(AccessController.java:118)
at com.ibm.ws.management.AdminServiceImpl.invoke(AdminServiceImpl.java:1225)
at com.ibm.ws.management.PlatformMBeanServer.invoke(PlatformMBeanServer.java:743)
at org.mule.module.management.agent.Mx4jAgent.start(Mx4jAgent.java:201)
Looking at the second (and last) stack trace cause, there seem to be some confusion or assumption about the JMX Server Instance Name. However, I have no control on that (and I can't figure why it works fine in Jetty and not in WAS 7).
Has anyone stepped through that before? Am I doing something wrong? Am I missing something here?
Thanks a lot for any response!

Answer 1

For WAS using JMX is not that straightforward. Complications are:
Security - one can't access JMX endpoint by default without further security configuration (out of scope for this discussion).
Websphere's JMX server implementation actually modifies MBean domain names to be prefixed with WAS Node and Cell. There is a WAS-specific API that can get you those, but the takeaway is this can't be done without further coding.
Andrew