Gathering information from a tool like visualVM or JConsole is great, but the truth of the matter is that most companies don't really care for remote JMX, they don't use it, or they simply have too much security in the way for you to look over production data remotely.

Enter a command-line way to view JMX information from the privacy of your own command-line

• Step one, add the following arguments to your JVM startup (frequently a file that lives in /etc/init.d/tomcat5)

Dcom.sun.management.jmxremote -Dcom.sun.management.jmxremote.port=1234 -Dcom.sun.management.jmxremote.ssl=false -Dcom.sun.management.jmxremote.authenticate=false

• Step two, download a command-line tool that talks to your JVM like "jmxterm"

https://sourceforge.net/projects/cyclops-group/files/jmxterm/

• Step three, run it with the following arguments

tomcat5@hammerfish:/home/tomcat5# java -jar ./jmxterm-1.0-alpha-4-uber.jar -l localhost:1234

Now, you are sitting in an interactive terminal that can take interesting arguments as follows:

Welcome to JMX terminal. Type "help" for available commands.
$>help
#following commands are available to use:
about    - Display about page
bean     - Display or set current selected MBean.
beans    - List available beans under a domain or all domains
bye      - Terminate console and exit
close    - Close current JMX connection
domain   - Display or set current selected domain.
domains  - List all available domain names
exit     - Terminate console and exit
get      - Get value of MBean attribute(s)
help     - Display available commands or usage of a command
info     - Display detail information about an MBean
jvms     - List all running local JVM processes
open     - Open JMX session or display current connection
option   - Set options for command session
quit     - Terminate console and exit
run      - Invoke an MBean operation
set      - Set value of an MBean attribute
$>

and ..

$>beans
#domain = Catalina:
Catalina:J2EEApplication=none,J2EEServer=none,WebModule=//localhost/,j2eeType=Servlet,name=action
Catalina:J2EEApplication=none,J2EEServer=none,WebModule=//localhost/,j2eeType=Servlet,name=default
Catalina:J2EEApplication=none,J2EEServer=none,WebModule=//localhost/,j2eeType=Servlet,name=depot
Catalina:J2EEApplication=none,J2EEServer=none,WebModule=//localhost/,j2eeType=Servlet,name=jsp

or ...

#domain is set to java.lang
$>beans
#domain = java.lang:
java.lang:name=CMS Old Gen,type=MemoryPool
java.lang:name=CMS Perm Gen,type=MemoryPool
java.lang:name=Code Cache,type=MemoryPool
java.lang:name=CodeCacheManager,type=MemoryManager
java.lang:name=ConcurrentMarkSweep,type=GarbageCollector
java.lang:name=Par Eden Space,type=MemoryPool
java.lang:name=Par Survivor Space,type=MemoryPool
java.lang:name=ParNew,type=GarbageCollector
java.lang:type=ClassLoading
java.lang:type=Compilation
java.lang:type=Memory
java.lang:type=OperatingSystem
java.lang:type=Runtime
java.lang:type=Threading
$>

or ..

$>jvms
13097    ( ) - jmxterm-1.0-alpha-4-uber.jar -l localhost:1234

now, let's zero in on a specific bean to gather information about it

$>bean java.lang:type=ClassLoading
#bean is set to java.lang:type=ClassLoading
$>info
#mbean = java.lang:type=ClassLoading
#class name = sun.management.ClassLoadingImpl
# attributes
%0   - LoadedClassCount (int, r)
%1   - TotalLoadedClassCount (long, r)
%2   - UnloadedClassCount (long, r)
%3   - Verbose (boolean, rw)
#there's no operations
#there's no notifications

From here we can look at the attributes above, interactively as follows

$>get TotalLoadedClassCount
#mbean = java.lang:type=ClassLoading:
TotalLoadedClassCount = 2901;

Now, let's discuss how we gather this information in a "non-interactive" way. This command will do the same thing without navigating the interperter

tomcat5@hammerfish:/home/tomcat5# echo get -s -b java.lang:type=ClassLoading TotalLoadedClassCount | java -jar ./jmxterm-1.0-alpha-4-uber.jar -l localhost:1234 -v silent -n
2903

source = http://ottleys.net/2010/08/

the article is entitled "Alfresco: JMX from the command line"