Some jmx beans report null which is a good thing in some cases e.g. pending items queue in cassandra

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What steps will reproduce the problem?
./check_jmx -U service:jmx:rmi:///jndi/rmi://WWW.XXX.YYY.ZZZ:8080/jmxrmi -O 
org.apache.cassandra.db:type=CompactionManager -A ColumnFamilyInProgress   
JMX CRITICAL - null

What is the expected output? What do you see instead?
An extra arguement which would allow converting the text output from null to 0, 
so that you can then assign warn/critical thresholds

What version of the product are you using? On what operating system?
SunOS - 5.10 Generic_141414-10 sun4v sparc SUNW,Sun-Fire-T200

and

Distributor ID: Ubuntu
Description:    Ubuntu 10.10
Release:        10.10
Codename:       maverick

Code version: jmxquery-1.0

Please provide any additional information below.

I have also noticed when you try and produce a verbose output that this creates 
an error

./check_jmx -U service:jmx:rmi:///jndi/rmi://WWW.XXX.YYY.ZZZ:8080/jmxrmi -O 
org.apache.cassandra.db:type=CompactionManager -A ColumnFamilyInProgress -v
JMX CRITICAL - null

./check_jmx -U service:jmx:rmi:///jndi/rmi://WWW.XXX.YYY.ZZZ:8080/jmxrmi -O 
org.apache.cassandra.db:type=CompactionManager -A ColumnFamilyInProgress -vv
JMX CRITICAL - null connecting to 
org.apache.cassandra.db:type=CompactionManager by URL 
service:jmx:rmi:///jndi/rmi://WWW.XXX.YYY.ZZZ:8080/jmxrmi

./check_jmx -U service:jmx:rmi:///jndi/rmi://WWW.XXX.YYY.ZZZ:8080/jmxrmi -O 
org.apache.cassandra.db:type=CompactionManager -A ColumnFamilyInProgress -vvv
JMX CRITICAL - null connecting to 
org.apache.cassandra.db:type=CompactionManager by URL 
service:jmx:rmi:///jndi/rmi://WWW.XXX.YYY.ZZZ:8080/jmxrmijava.lang.NullPointerEx
ception
        at jmxquery.JMXQuery.parseData(JMXQuery.java:231)
        at jmxquery.JMXQuery.execute(JMXQuery.java:210)
        at jmxquery.JMXQuery.main(JMXQuery.java:90)

Original issue reported on code.google.com by paul.can...@gmail.com on 30 Mar 2011 at 1:23