What is Java Mission Control?

JDK Mission Control is a suite of tools for monitoring, profiling and diagnosing applications running in production on the HotSpot JVM.

Java Mission Control Features

JDK Mission Control mainly consists of two tools at the time of writing:

  • The JMX Console – a JVM and application monitoring solution based on JMX.
  • The JDK Flight Recorder – a very low overhead profiling and diagnostics tool.

There are also plug-ins available that extend the functionality of JDK Mission Control to, for example, perform heap waste analysis on heap dumps.

Java Mission Control Tutorial

This tutorial will focus on the JDK Flight Recorder part of JDK Mission Control, with bonus exercises for the heap dump analysis tool (JOverflow) and the JMX Console towards the end.

JDK Mission Control can be run both as a stand-alone application and inside of Eclipse. This tutorial can be used with either way of running Mission Control.