There are two options for how the Oracle Coherence Monitor communicates with a Coherence cluster:

1. Run the Oracle Coherence Monitor remotely gathering Coherence grid data through a remote JMX port on one of your nodes. 
2. Run the Oracle Coherence Monitor as a management node in your Coherence grid.

Everything from system requirements and setup to command line options for running the monitor are different based on which method you select. This page explains how to select which option to use. For new users that want to get up and running quickly, the JMX remote port connection is recommended, as the setup for that is easier. If you decide later that you want to run the monitor as a management node in your cluster, you can switch to that option anytime.

Running the Oracle Coherence Monitor Using a Remote JMX Port
In this configuration, the Oracle Coherence Monitor communicates with your cluster using the standard JMX remote port interface. In order to support this, you will need to configure one of the nodes in your cluster to run as a management node and JMX MBeanServer. You will also need to configure all of the nodes in your cluster that you want to monitor to expose their metrics to the management node. Details of this setup are described in the setup section of this document, and in the Coherence documentation. Once you have done this setup, the management node will collect metric information from all of the other nodes using TCMP, then will pass this information to the Oracle Coherence Monitor via a JMX remote port connection:

This deployment is recommended if

• You are new to Enterprise RTView and want to get up and running quickly as the setup for this is simpler than running the Oracle Coherence Monitor as a management node
• You have a small number of nodes and/or caches in your cluster (see performance note below)
• You are able to expose a JMX remote port for at least one node in your cluster (NOTE: This node must be running on Java version 1.5.0+)
• You are unable to run the Oracle Coherence Monitor as a node in your cluster due to security limitations (e.g.: no access to unicast or multicast ports on which Coherence is running, firewall issues, etc.)
• You want to limit interactivity - using JMX remote port, you can access information and reset statistics, but you cannot delete objects
• You want to secure your cache data - using JMX remote port, users cannot see the data in the cache, only the metrics

Running the Oracle Coherence Monitor as a Management Node
In this configuration, the Oracle Coherence Monitor runs as the management node in your cluster. In order to support this, you will need to configure all of the nodes in your cluster that you want to monitor to expose their metrics to the management node. Details of this setup are described in the setup section of this document, and in the Coherence documentation. Once you have done this setup, the management node will collect metric information from all of the other nodes using TCMP, then will use an internal connection to JMX, removing the need for the remote port access and improving the performance ten fold:

This deployment is recommended if

• You have a large number of nodes and/or caches (see performance note below)
• You are unable to expose a JMX remote port for at least one node in your cluster (NOTE: This node must be running on Java version 1.5.0+)
• You are able to run the Oracle Coherence Monitor as a node in your cluster
• You want to see your cache data in the monitor

Performance Note
 A Coherence JMX node will create one uniquely named MBean of type Cache for each combination of Node and Cache in a cluster. If the total of number of Nodes times number of Caches is large, e.g. greater than 100, you may see performance degrade, as there is significant overhead associated with aggregating metrics across a large number of MBeans and accessing it via a remote port. When you run the Oracle Coherence Monitor as a management node, no remote port connection is needed.