State metric for a Java Tomcat process always reporting as "sleeping"

[Kevin_Brunette]

I'm running metricbeat oss 7.14.0 on Ubuntu 18.04.6 (Bionic Beaver) LTS and attempting to tell if my Java Tomcat is running or down however; the "state" of the process always reports as "sleeping" regardless of whether the process is running or has been stopped.

My Metricbeat config is the following:

########################## Metricbeat Configuration ###########################
# This file is a full configuration example documenting all non-deprecated
# options in comments. For a shorter configuration example, that contains only
# the most common options, please see metricbeat.yml in the same directory.
#
# You can find the full configuration reference here:
# https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/beats/metricbeat/index.html
#==========================  Modules configuration =============================
metricbeat.modules:
#-------------------------------- System Module --------------------------------
- module: system
  metricsets:
    - cpu             # CPU usage
    - load            # CPU load averages
    - memory          # Memory usage
    - network         # Network IO
    - process         # Per process metrics
    - process_summary # Process summary
    - uptime          # System Uptime
    - socket_summary  # Socket summary
    #- core           # Per CPU core usage
    - diskio         # Disk IO
    - filesystem     # File system usage for each mountpoint
    - fsstat         # File system summary metrics
    #- raid           # Raid
    - socket         # Sockets and connection info (linux only)
    - service        # systemd service information
  enabled: true
  period: 60s
  processes: ['.*']

  # Configure the mount point of the host's filesystem for use in monitoring a host from within a container
  #system.hostfs: "/hostfs"
  # Configure the metric types that are included by these metricsets.
  cpu.metrics:  ["percentages","normalized_percentages"]  # The other available option is ticks.
  core.metrics: ["percentages"]  # The other available option is ticks.

processors:
  - add_host_metadata:
  - add_cloud_metadata:

setup.dashboards.enabled: false
setup.template.enabled: false
setup.ilm.enabled: false

output.elasticsearch:
  hosts: ["https://myelasticelastic:1000"]
  username: "<omitted>"
  password: "<omitted>"
  compression_level: 4
  slow_start: true

I've started and stopped the process and it always reports as "sleeping". Is this a bug? Is there a better way to tell if the process is down or up?

[Mario_Castro]

Apart from a permissions issue, you can try the Tomcat module Tomcat module | Metricbeat Reference [7.15] | Elastic in the Xpack release, it's also free if that's your concern.

[Kevin_Brunette]

Is there a permission that needs to be set on the host in order for the "state" metric to be accurately calculated?