Configure BMX for Monitoring vFabric Web Server Instances

As of version 5.1, all new vFabric Web Server instances are configured with BMX by default.

BMX is an Apache HTTPD framework that provides internal runtime information (performance metrics, status, configuration, and current capacity) to monitoring applications such as vFabric Hyperic. In turn, these types of applications monitor the health of vFabric Web Server instances by running BMX queries to gather metrics and configuration information.

New vFabric Web Server instances have the following default BMX configuration:

Three main BMX modules (mod_bmx, mod_bmx_status, and mod_bmx_vhost) are all enabled. Together, these modules provide overall runtime statistics of the Web Server instance, as well as the virtual hosts running within the instance.
Access is allowed only to processes running on http://localhost (IP address 127.0.0.1), or in other words, only to monitoring applications running on the same computer as the Web Server instance.
Access requires no authentication.
BMX access is enabled for all virtual hosts defined for the Web Server instance.

The default BMX configuration for vFabric Web Server instances make them immediately available for monitoring by monitoring applications.

The BMX-related modules are loaded into the Web Server instance using appropriate LoadModule directives in the conf/httpd.conf configuration file. Additional BMX configuration is in the conf/extra/httpd-info.conf file, which the main conf/httpd.conf file includes using the Include conf/extra/httpd-info.conf directive.

Procedure

To disable BMX access to your vFabric Web Server instance, comment out the appropriate LoadModule directives in the conf/httpd.conf configuration file for your instance as shown:

#LoadModule bmx_module c:/opt/vmware/vfabric-web-server/httpd-2.2/modules/mod_bmx.so
#LoadModule bmx_status_module c:/opt/vmware/vfabric-web-server/httpd-2.2/modules/mod_bmx_status.so
#LoadModule bmx_vhost_module c:/opt/vmware/vfabric-web-server/httpd-2.2/modules/mod_bmx_vhost.so

To allow BMX access to processes running on hosts other than the localhost, edit the <Location /bmx> directive in the conf/extra/httpd-info.conf file and add the IP address or fully qualified domain name to the Allow from directive. For example, to allow myhost.com access in addition to localhost:
```
<Location /bmx>
    SetHandler bmx-handler
    Order Deny,Allow
    Deny from all
    Allow from 127.0.0.1 myhost.com
</Location>
```

To restrict BMX access to a particular virtual host, put the <Location /bmx> directive inside the appropriate <VirtualHost> directive. For example:

<VirtualHost 10.1.2.3:80>
    DocumentRoot "/opt/vmware/vfabric-web-server/myserver/myhost.com/htdocs"
    ServerName status.myhost.com
    ...
    <Location /bmx>
        SetHandler bmx-handler
        Order Deny,Allow
        Deny from all
        Allow from 127.0.0.1 myhost.com
    </Location>
</VirtualHost>

What to do next

Restart the vFabric Web Server instance for the configuration changes to take effect. For example, on Unix:
```
prompt# cd /opt/vmware/vfabric-web-server/myserver
prompt# bin/httpdctl restart
```