Monitoring/Profiling/Debugging Java Process Remotely

Usually there are two difficulties involved:

1. How to communicate between the remote (target) machine and the local (console) machine? This varies per monitoring/profiling/debugging method. E.g., the built-in JMX console (jconsole) uses remote RMI.
   
2. How to penetrate the firewall if existing?

The generic approach is:

1. Know how to do it locally;
2. Run a vncserver on the remote machine (In fact, vncserver is lightweight, and easy to install in case there is no vncserver installed on the remote machine);
3. Use ssh to set up a tunnel between the remote machine and the local machine, e.g., ssh -L5901:remote_machine:5901 userid@remote_machine (ssh is very user-friendly w.r.t. firewall);
   
4. Start a vnc verview locally, pointing to localhost:1, and follow the procedure established in step 1.

In this way, remote monitoring/profiling/debugging tasks are doable following a step-by-step procedure.

Of course, sometimes, there is no need to set up a vncserver as long as the communication between the remote machine and the local machine is done in TCP and the port number is known.