Monitoring

Monitoring your SonarQube instance is key to keeping it healthy and having happy users.

As a start, you can use this Web API to get an overview of the health of your SonarQube installation:

• api/system/health

Java Process Memory

The SonarQube application server consists of three main Java processes:

• Web (including embedded web server)
• ElasticSearch
• Compute Engine

Each of these Java processes has its own memory settings that can be configured in the $SONARQUBE-HOME/conf/sonar.properties file. The default memory settings that ship with SonarQube are fine for most instances. If you are supporting a large SonarQube instance (more than 100 users or more than 5,000,000 lines of code) or an instance that is part of your Continuous Integration pipeline, you should monitor the memory and CPU usage of all three key Java processes on your instance, along with overall disk space. Monitoring will allow you to see if any of the processes is running short of resources and take action ahead of resource shortages. There are a large number of monitoring tools available, both open source and commercial, to help you with this task. SonarSource does not recommend or endorse any particular tool.

Memory settings

You may need to increase your memory settings if you see the following symptoms:

• Your monitoring tools show one or more of the SonarQube processes is reaching its memory limit
• Any of the SonarQube processes crashes and/or generates an out-of-memory error in the sonar.log file
• A SonarQube background task fails with an out-of-memory error in the background task log
• The size of the Issues index of your ElasticSearch instance (visible in the System Info) is greater than or equal to the memory allocated to the ElasticSearch Java process

You can increase the maximum memory allocated to the appropriate process by increasing the -Xmx memory setting for the corresponding Java process in your $SONARQUBE-HOME/conf/sonar.properties file:

• For Web: sonar.web.javaOpts
• For ElasticSearch: sonar.search.javaOpts
• For Compute Engine: sonar.ce.javaOpts

The -Xmx parameter accepts numbers in both megabytes (e.g. -Xmx2048m) and gigabytes (e.g. -Xmx2G)

For detailed information on JMX Beans exposed by SonarQube and more ElasticSearch monitoring options, please visit our Monitoring Details page.

Exposed JMX MBeans

The SonarQube Server offers visibility about what happens internally through the exposure of JMX MBeans.

In addition to the classical Java MBeans providing information about the ClassLoader, OS, Memory and Threads you have access to four more MBeans in the SonarQube Server:

• ComputeEngine
• Database
• SonarQube

All these MBeans are read-only. It's not possible to modify or reset their values in real time.

ComputeEngineTasks MBean

How do I Activate JMX?

Local Access

There is nothing to activate to view SonarQube MBeans if your tool is running on the same server as the SonarQube Server.

Remote Access

Here are examples of configuration to activate remote access to JMX MBeans.

For the WebServer:

# JMX WEB - 10443/10444
sonar.web.javaAdditionalOpts=-Dcom.sun.management.jmxremote=true -Dcom.sun.management.jmxremote.ssl=false -Dcom.sun.management.jmxremote.authenticate=true -Dcom.sun.management.jmxremote.port=10443 -Dcom.sun.management.jmxremote.rmi.port=10444 -Dcom.sun.management.jmxremote.password.file=/opt/sonarsource/sonar/conf/jmxremote.password -Dcom.sun.management.jmxremote.access.file=/opt/sonarsource/sonar/conf/jmxremote.access

For the ComputeEngine:

There is no specific javaAdditionalOpts entry, simply amend the sonar.ce.javaOpts one.

Example of jmxremote.access:

#
# JMX Access Control file
#
reader readonly
admin  readwrite \
    create javax.management.monitor.*,javax.management.timer.*,com.sun.management.*,com.oracle.jrockit.* \
    unregister

Example of jmxremote.password:

#
# JMX Access Password file
#
reader readerpassword
admin  adminpassword

Note: on jmxremote.password, you should apply chmod 600 or 400 for security reasons.