Challenges in JVM monitoring: How Applications Manager can help

Slow Java applications, unexpected crashes, and cryptic memory issues—these are signs your JVM might be silently struggling. JVM monitoring is essential to ensure the uptime and optimum performance of your Java applications. It provides visibility into how the Java Virtual Machine is utilizing memory, threads, and CPU resources, allowing you to identify performance issues before they impact end users. From locating memory leaks to understanding garbage collection activity, monitoring JVM helps your apps perform and handle loads more efficiently.

Although it sounds simple, admins have a hard time with JVM monitoring without an efficient JVM monitoring solution in place. Here are a few challenges you need to know about:

Top five JVM monitoring challenges

1. Garbage collection awareness

You can monitor and optimize garbage collection (GC) in a timely discipline, but correlating GC pauses to KPIs is where basic monitoring tools fail. GC events rarely surface in time to help you proactively correct GC errors, you can only suspect something if there is a latency or high response time alarm.

2. Hidden memory leaks and out of memory errors

JVM abstracts low-level memory management. This makes memory leaks harder to detect and easy to overlook. Heap bloating is gradual, and by the time it balloons up and triggers an out of memory error, it will be too late to locate the root cause.

3. Thread contention and deadlocks

Issues like thread contention, deadlocks, and starvation issues create a need for a manual check on thread dumps. Analyzing such data is not scalable, especially during peak hours and when dealing with ephemeral JVMs.

4. Numerous independent metrics

Modern Java applications generate a high volume of  dynamic labels like user IDs and session tokens that come with unique KPIs and metrics. These metrics vary from app to app and work up monitoring tools with large chunks of performance data. This can lag JVM monitoring interfaces and make analysis difficult.

5. Alert noise 

The key performance indicators for JVMs behave dynamically, depending on various factors like load, time of the day, and resource availability. Alerts are just noise without historically analyzed and evaluated thresholds. Outdated thresholds and irregular escalations cause unnecessary alert noise and false alarms. This causes alert fatigue and overlooked incidents, affecting issue resolution and degrading overall application performance.

How Applications Manager can help

While JVM monitoring presents several challenges, they can be effectively managed with the right strategies and tools. Here are ManageEngine Applications Manager’s key capabilities that can help you monitor your JVM environments efficiently:

Real-time KPI tracking

Applications Manager can monitor key JVM metrics like memory, thread usage, garbage collection, heap dumps, and many more, to ensure deep visibility and meticulous performance tracking. Its performance polling helps you understand metric performance and application uptime at any given time. Here are the key JVM metrics you can monitor with Applications Manager:

• Process memory

• Throughput

• Latency

• Response time

• Heap and non-heap memory

• Garbage collection

• Cache

• Thread pool statistics

Java application performance monitoring

You can also set up Applications Manager to gather Java application level metrics and traces using the Java APM feature. This makes it easier to correlate JVM metrics to application traces. You can then determine whether performance issues (such as latency spikes) are due to JVM-level constraints (like inefficient garbage collection) or code-level problems.

JMX metric collection

You can also enable the collection of Java Management Extensions (JMX) metrics from any Mbeans registered in the JVM using Applications Manager's JMX monitoring capabilities. This allows monitoring of additional metrics from Java-based services such as Tomcat, JBoss, etc. You can identify transactions, threads, and connection pools consuming JVM resources and also perform a thread dump analysis to troubleshoot complex problems in production.

Historical performance analysis 

Applications Manager provides detailed insights on the performance of each KPI over a given period of time. This helps you understand root causes and patterns that are not visible in real-time monitoring. Such analysis provides you with actionable data that helps you make well-informed decisions while optimizing your application landscape.

Smart alerts

The tool’s AI-driven alerting system helps you automate alert triggering based on severity. You can automate escalation based on warning frequency and trigger responsive actions to accelerate issue resolution. Applications Manager allows you to set up alarms on multiple communication media like SMS, e-mail, etc. Also, you can integrate your Slack channels with Applications Manager to receive alerts in real time.

Adaptive thresholds

Applications Manager lets you set up adaptive thresholds for KPIs that exhibit dynamic behavior as your IT scales up and down. This brings alert noise down and enhances quick and valid alert escalation. You will be able to cut down false alarms and ensure smooth issue resolution without overlooking.

Scalability

Applications Manager can scale accordingly with your dynamic IT architecture. It can be adapted by small, medium, and large scale enterprises efficiently, providing a transparent licensing plan for each. You can add or remove monitoring interfaces as you need, without any loss of context or visibility. Learn more.

Unified platform for context-aware diagnostics

All JVM metrics, application metrics and traces, and other infrastructure metrics are available in one place, giving you a holistic view of Java application and infrastructure health. This makes it easier to optimize JVM and application performance.

Unlock JVM monitoring with Applications Manager now!

You can get started JVM monitoring with Applications Manager in a minute by following our step-by-step guide. Unlock deep visibility into your JVMs and Java applications by downloading a 30-day, free trial now!

Applications Manager offers monitoring support for over 150 technologies that include web services, cloud services, middleware, VMs, ERPs, databases, containers, web servers, applications servers, cloud applications, and many more. With state-of-the-art monitoring features, it stands as a favorite for more than 10,000 IT admins over the globe.

Want to know more? Schedule a demo session and our experts will get back to you!