Inspired greatly by Gregor and Erik's great talk at TSSJS 2006 we've started to add some visualisation plugins into Apache ServiceMix.
This implementation uses the Interfaces EndpointListener respectively ExchangeListener and creates DOT files (online viewer Grappa).
Both visualisation listeners can be added to the <listeners> element of the <container> tag (see Configuration below).
Component and Endpoint visualisation
There is a <dotViewEndpointListener/> listener plugin which generates a DOT file representing the components and their endpoints.
MessageExchange flow
<dotViewFlowListener/> is another listener which generates a graph representing the message exchanges flow within the container.
Configuration
The following example shows how to configure a simple visualization listener in the servicemix.xml config file.
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Realtime Monitoring
The InstantSVC project provides a set of shell scripts which uses dnotify for monitoring the dot files generated by ServiceMix
in order to render postscript or png files with dot.
To achieve realtime monitoring postscript viewers can be used which usually have a feature to watch for file changes.
See the release notes of the realtime monitoring package for further details and an example configuration.
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