Direct JMX access
Try adding this to catalina.sh/bat:
-Dcom.sun.management.jmxremote
-Dcom.sun.management.jmxremote.port=5005
-Dcom.sun.management.jmxremote.ssl=false
-Dcom.sun.management.jmxremote.authenticate=false
UPDATE: Alex P suggest that the following settings might also be required in some situations:
-Dcom.sun.management.jmxremote.host=localhost
This enables remote anonymous JMX connections on port 5005. You may also consider JVisualVM which is much more please and allows to browse JMX via plugin.
What you are looking for is Catalina -> ThreadPool -> http-bio-8080 -> various interesting metrics.
JMX proxy servlet
Easier method might be to use Tomcat's JMX proxy servlet under: http://localhost:8080/manager/jmxproxy. For instance try this query:
$ curl --user tomcat:tomcat http://localhost:8080/manager/jmxproxy?qry=Catalina:name=%22http-bio-8080%22,type=ThreadPool
A little bit of grepping and scripting and you can easily and remotely monitor your application. Note that tomcat:tomcat is the username/password of user having manager-jmx role in conf/tomcat-users.xml.
Thank you Tomasz I will give this a go. I don't think I can use the proxy servlet as it's under the manager which unfortunately for some reason appears to have been removed from the installation - the admin dir exists but the manager does not.
I tried using curl/jmxproxy as above but it just gave a 404 so I think the manager is borked, I'm gonna try enabling JMX on an explicit port as suggested above see if that works. Thanks for the help everyone!