Monitor and optimize Java application performance
Identify slow traces and code-level bottlenecks.
Developers can easily identify slow internal invocations (methods) in the Java code and view the entire pathway in a hierarchical tree view. Unlike lightweight tools that only provide surface-level metrics, our distributed tracing charts the complete sequence of invocations, including custom user-defined methods.
You can also view the SQL queries involved in such transactions along with their stack traces, making it simple to pinpoint exact lines of code causing latency.
Evaluate the performance of database calls.
Opting to move a part of your database tables to an in-memory cache like Memcached, Couchbase, or Redis? Make your decision based on relevant data and statistics such as:
- The most hit database tables and busiest instances.
- The busiest table and the most frequently performed SQL operations.
- Web transactions issuing expensive or redundant SQL calls.
- The most executed database operations correlated with their response times.
Get detailed performance metrics to identify slow database calls, high resource usage, and the overall performance impact of database queries, furnished with detailed graphical and tabular representations.
Analyze your JVM metrics to prevent memory leaks.
Monitor critical parameters of the JVM, including JVM CPU usage count, heap memory utilization, Garbage Collection (GC) pauses, GC count, GC time, and thread summary. Memory leaks and prolonged GC pauses are common causes of stuttering or crashing in Java apps.
By capturing detailed heap metrics alongside application transaction data, you can configure threshold values and establish baselines. Your alerts will only trigger when there is a genuine deviation from normal behavior, ensuring optimal Java application performance without alert fatigue.
Monitor your custom Java components.
Develop wider insights into your applications and effortlessly track the performance of specific features, background threads, or modular components. Custom Instrumentation for the Java agent can be deployed dynamically using Java Annotations or through a comprehensive configuration file.
This flexibility bridges the gap between out-of-the-box monitoring and the specific, customized needs of complex enterprise Java deployments.
Track background transactions and async processes.
Modern Java applications heavily rely on asynchronous processing. Apart from standard web transactions, automatically track the various background tasks run by applications, such as those associated with maintenance routines, schedulers (e.g., Quartz), and messaging queues (e.g., Kafka, RabbitMQ).
Enterprise vs. open-source vs. lightweight profiling
When selecting a monitoring strategy, consider how different tools meet your needs:
- Standard profilers (VisualVM, JProfiler): Best for localized, deep-dive debugging of CPU bottlenecks and memory leaks during development. They are highly detailed but can introduce overhead in production.
- Open-source tools (Prometheus, Grafana): Excellent for customized dashboarding of JMX metrics but require significant configuration, maintenance, and separate tools for tracing.
- Enterprise APM platforms (Site24x7): Ideal for mission-critical production environments. They offer AI-driven insights, distributed tracing across microservices, and out-of-the-box alerting without the maintenance burden of open-source stacks.
Additional features in Java APM
- With up to 15 different services supported, monitor all applications accessing your AWS environment seamlessly.
- Integrate APM Insight with Real User Monitoring (RUM) to correlate back-end JVM performance with frontend user experience.
- Combine APM Insight with Site24x7 Server Monitoring to increase visibility into the underlying infrastructure hosting your Java environment.
Site24x7's Java monitoring tool supports a wide variety of application servers
Frequently asked questions about Java APM
1. What is Java monitoring?
Java monitoring involves actively observing and tracking Java application performance, including server surveillance and JVM health. It focuses on tracing crucial metrics across platforms like Apache Tomcat, Spring Boot, JBoss, GlassFish, and WildFly. This process aids in identifying and fixing code-level errors and database bottlenecks, thereby improving the end-user experience.
2. Why is Java performance monitoring important?
Java monitoring tools are essential for understanding and enhancing the performance of Java applications by addressing issues native to them. A Java monitoring tool is important because:
- They allow developers to analyze critical JVM metrics such as CPU usage, heap memory leaks, and GC pauses. This helps in addressing issues like application crashes or slow performance.
- They streamline troubleshooting, making root-cause analysis more efficient in both the pre-production and post-production stages.
- They provide distributed tracing capabilities that help identify the root cause of issues traversing complex microservices architectures.
- They utilize service maps to analyze the impact of remote services like databases and cache systems on the overall Java application latency.
3. How does a Java application monitoring tool work?
Users can actively utilize a Java monitoring tool to monitor method-level performance by instrumenting Java applications and gathering and analyzing performance-related data. Instrumentation involves marking the start and end time of a method to capture information on the execution duration. Furthermore, you can collect other essential metrics such as arguments passed or SQL queries and aggregate them within a processed request or API.
While Java applications include built-in tools like JProfiler and VisualVM to assist in local performance profiling, these tools do not provide comprehensive support for continuous production monitoring, distributed tracing, or historical alerting. Therefore, an enterprise Java APM tool becomes essential to ensure the seamless performance of modern Java applications in production.
4. What are the benefits of using a dedicated Java monitoring tool?
A dedicated Java application performance monitoring tool offers several benefits, facilitating the tracking of unique metrics of your Java application in real-time.
- Allows monitoring of various application-specific metrics such as JVM CPU usage count, memory utilization, garbage collection count and time, and thread summary.
- Enables the identification of slow traces, improving anomaly detection across microservices.
- Offers AI-powered alerts for proactive monitoring before end-users are impacted.
- Utilizes Java Management Extensions (JMX) metrics for better management and performance enhancement of your Java applications.
5. Why should you choose Site24x7 as your Java performance monitoring tool?
Site24x7's Java performance monitoring tool not only aids in standard response time tracking but also provides advanced distributed tracing to track a single request hopping between various microservices. Our Java monitoring platform allows you to integrate with external dependencies, like SQL/NoSQL databases and external APIs, to contextualize performance data. It seamlessly combines with Site24x7's server monitoring, providing complete full-stack observability for your Java application environment.