How to Enable Java Debugger for Glassfish Cluster Profile

Originally posted on

Monday Jul 07, 2008

Often times things work fine for Single Instance App Server, but when the same application is put on cluster mode, the results are not as expected. For glassfish, the steps I use for enabling the debugger for cluster mode is slightly from non-cluster mode. Also, there is one extra manual step involved to make the debugger work.

First for Clustered Glassfish, you can easily enable the debugger using the Admin Web GUI. Here are the steps involved. (for the purposes of illustration cluster name and instance name  is assumed to be cluster1 and instance-ONE)

Log on to Admin GUI (http://<server>:4848/index.jsf).

1. Navigate to Configurations -> cluster1-config -> JVM Settings
2. On the General Tab, Enable the Debug Check Box and for the Debug Options Text Box remove the port number. Leave it blank (Figure 1).
3. Shutdown node agent (asadmin stop-node-agent)
4. Go to domain.xml for the cluster instance (\\openesb\\glassfish\\nodeagents\\cluster1-nodeagent\\instance-ONE\\config) and enable the debug-enabled flag to true for the cluster1-config (Figure 2). 
5. Start the node agent (asadmin start-node-agent) and look for the debug port in the server log (Figure 3). The server log will print the port to use.