eBPF has revolutionized the observability landscape in the Linux kernel. Throughout our previous blog post series, I covered the fundamental building blocks of the eBPF ecosystem, scratched the surface of XDP and showed how closely it cooperates with the eBPF infrastructure to introduce a fast-processing datapath in the networking stack. Nevertheless, eBPF is not exclusive to kernel-space tracing.

In Part 1 we’ve described what container monitoring is and why you need it. Because each container typically runs a single process, has its own environment, utilizes virtual networks, or has various methods of managing storage. Traditional monitoring solutions take metrics from each server and the applications they run. These servers and applications running on them are typically very static, with very long uptimes.

Even though containers have been around for ages, it wasn’t until Docker showed up that containers really became widely adopted. Docker has made it easier, faster, and cheaper to deploy containerized applications. However, organizations that adopt container orchestration tools for application deployment face new maintenance challenges.

Working with Java applications has a lot of benefits. Especially when compared to languages like C/C++. In the majority of cases, you get interoperability between operating systems and various environments. You can move your applications from server to server, from operating system to operating system, without major effort or in rare cases with minor changes.

In this tutorial, we will talk about how different Java Garbage Collectors work and what you can expect from them. This will give us the necessary background to start tuning the garbage collection algorithm of your choice. Before going into Java Garbage Collection tuning we need to understand two things. First of all, how garbage collection works in theory and how it works in the system we are going to tune.