ActiveMQ supports advisory messages which allows you to watch the system using regular JMS messages. Currently we have advisory messages that support

  • consumers, producers and connections starting and stopping
  • temporary destinations being created and destroyed
  • messages expiring on topics and queues
  • brokers sending messages to destinations with no consumers.
  • connections starting and stopping

Advisory messages can be thought as some kind of administrative channel where you receive information regarding what is happening on your JMS provider along with whats happening with producers, consumers and destinations.

When you look at a broker via JMX you will see the advisory topics prefixed with ActiveMQ.Advisory..

The following advisory topics are supported

Client based advisories

Advisory Topics Description
ActiveMQ.Advisory.Connection Connection start & stop messages
ActiveMQ.Advisory.Producer.Queue Producer start & stop messages on a Queue
ActiveMQ.Advisory.Producer.Topic Producer start & stop messages on a Topic
ActiveMQ.Advisory.Consumer.Queue Consumer start & stop messages on a Queue
ActiveMQ.Advisory.Consumer.Topic Consumer start & stop messages on a Topic

Note that the consumer start/stop advisory messages also have a consumerCount header to indicate the number of active consumers on the destintation when the advisory message was sent. This means you can use the following selector to be notified when there are no active consumers on a given destination...

consumerCount = 0

Destination and Message based advisories

Advisory Topics Description
ActiveMQ.Advisory.Queue Queue create & destroy
ActiveMQ.Advisory.Topic Topic create & destroy
ActiveMQ.Advisory.TempQueue Temporary Queue create & destroy
ActiveMQ.Advisory.TempTopic Temporary Topic create & destroy
ActiveMQ.Advisory.Expired.Queue Expired messages on a Queue
ActiveMQ.Advisory.Expired.Topic Expired messages on a Topic
ActiveMQ.Advisory.NoConsumer.Queue No consumer is available to process messages being sent on a Queue
ActiveMQ.Advisory.NoConsumer.Topic No consumer is available to process messages being sent on a Topic

Using the destinations

All of the above destinations are really prefixes which are appended with important information (like the actual topic or queue, the client ID, producer ID, consumer ID etc). This allows you to reuse the power of publish/subscribe, Wildcards and Selectors to filter the advisory messages as you see fit.

For example if you want to subscribe to expired messages on a topic FOO.BAR you could subscribe to ActiveMQ.Advisory.Expired.Topic.FOO.BAR. To subscribe to all messages of a certain kind of advisory just append .> to the topic.

e.g. to subscribe to all the consumers starting and stopping to topics and queues subscribe to ActiveMQ.Advisory.Consumer..>.

Helper methods

Methods to get the advisory destination objects are available in AdvisorySupport through the following methods.

AdvisorySupport.getConsumerAdvisoryTopic()
AdvisorySupport.getProducerAdvisoryTopic()
AdvisorySupport.getExpiredTopicMessageAdvisoryTopic()
AdvisorySupport.getExpiredQueueMessageAdvisoryTopic()
AdvisorySupport.getNoTopicConsumersAdvisoryTopic()
AdvisorySupport.getNoQueueConsumersAdvisoryTopic()
AdvisorySupport.getDestinationAdvisoryTopic()

A subscription to each of the destination returns an ActiveMQMessage. Specific DataStructure objects (ie. ConsumerInfo, ProducerInfo,ConnectionInfo) can be retrieve via getDataStructure method of ActiveMQMessage.

For example:

...

    Destination advisoryDestination = AdvisorySupport.getProducerAdvisoryTopic(destination)
    MessageConsumer consumer = session.createConsumer(advisoryDestination);
    consumer.setMessageListener(this);
....
public void onMessage(Message msg){
    if (msg instanceof ActiveMQMessage){
        try {
             ActiveMQMessage aMsg =  (ActiveMQMessage)msg;
             ProducerInfo prod = (ProducerInfo) aMsg.getDataStructure();
        } catch (JMSException e) {
            log.error("Failed to process message: " + msg);
        }
    }
}

Some helper classes to deal with advisory messages are available in the advisories package.

For users of previous releases see the Advisory Support in ActiveMQ 3

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