Monitoring SiteMinder 12.52 Policy Server JVM

The SiteMinder Policy Server JVM has become very important to the health of the policy server. More and more, the authentication schemes are leveraging the JVM. Integrations with adaptive authentications and risk engines from Arcot as well as RSA will invoke the usage of the JVM. However, even if you are using Wily for SiteMinder, this data is not exposed. One simple option to keep an eye on the performance of the JVM is to enable the JMX counters. This will give you insight into the heap size and GC utilization. To enable this, you need to update the ../CA/siteminder/config/JVMOptions.txt file.

Right under the heap size parameters, add the following lines:
-Xms128m
-Xmx256m
-Dcom.sun.management.jmxremote.port=2048     (pick any port not in use)
-Dcom.sun.management.jmxremote.ssl=false
-Dcom.sun.management.jmxremote.authenticate=false

Make sure there are no trailing empty spaces as the JVM will not load and crash the policy server. Syntax is extremely sensitive.

Once it loads successfully, you can now access the JMX counters. From a locally installed JDK, (in this example on a windows desktop) launch ..\Java\jdk1.6.0_43\bin\jconsole.exe