Oracle Mission Control

Oracle's recent JDK versions come with the Oracle Mission Control tool, another tool to monitor JVM instances and running applications. Oracle Mission Control offers an even better user interface than Java VisualVM; otherwise, it has many similar features, including real-time monitoring of running JVM instances and applications.

Oracle Mission Control is proprietary software and has somewhat complicated license terms. Most of its features can be used free of charge, both for development and production use. Its most unique and desirable feature, Java Flight Recorder, can only be freely used in a development environment, though. Using this feature in a production scenario requires a paid license key from Oracle.

To run Oracle Mission Control, execute the following command:

jmc

With Java Flight Recorder, events from JVM can be recorded for a set time period. After the recording stops, all the recorded data can be analyzed. The advantage of Java Flight Recorder is that it has much less overhead than the real-time monitoring feature of both Oracle Mission Control and VisualVM; therefore, it is much safer to use on production systems (but again, don't forget about its license terms). In the following screenshot, I ran Flight Recorder on the NetBeans IDE process for a minute: