Which tools to use to monitor and analyse performance of Java?

Profile and monitor applications

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  VisualVM

  Allows you to monitor and analyse performance. It can be used as a stand-alone application or integrated with an IDE (currently Eclipse is supported).

  • Can be used as stand-alone application or from Eclipse
  • Great visual analysis of CPU, Heap/PermGen, Classes and Threads

• JVM Monitor

  It's a profiler integrated with Eclipse.

  • For simple usages should be enough
  • Integration with Eclipse only
  • Sometimes it gets stuck and the list of available applications to profile won't be refreshed

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  JProfiler

  The award winning tool for profiling Java applications. If you need the best tool around and you have some money to spend you can go for it.

  • Award winning tool
  • Integration with application servers
  • Trial licence

• Thread and Monitor Dump Analyzer for Java

  Useful for analysing javacore dumps.

  • Collects the data and shows it in a very simple form, but still better than raw file

Heap dump

• 

  Memory Analyzer (MAT)

  Great tool for analysing hprof heap dumps.

  • Acquire a heap dump from running process
  • Wizard for easy start
  • Build-in reports (leak suspects, top components)

• HeapAnalyser

  I've used it for analysing memory problems on IBM WebSphere application server.

  A graphical tool for discovering possible Java heap leaks

  • Supports .phd and .ha
  • Various possibilities to analyse heap
  • Avalilable as a jar file

Logs

• StdErr Analyser - hsa_jdk15.jar

  If you face a problem and the only thing you have is a log file (the stderr log), this application may be helpful. It plots heap size (with free heap, used heap and allocation failures).

  • Only command line
  • Hard to find