If you've ever had a Java application slow down in production and struggled to pinpoint the cause, you know the pain of performance issues. Java is a powerful, high-level language, but it doesn’t come without challenges—especially when it comes to resource management, garbage collection, and thread handling. This guide will take you through everything you need to know about Java performance monitoring, from key metrics to tools and best practices.

Understanding how your applications perform is crucial. OpenTelemetry has emerged as a powerful observability framework, offering a standardized approach to collecting telemetry data such as metrics, logs, and traces. For Java developers, the OpenTelemetry Java SDK provides the tools necessary to instrument applications effectively. This guide is all about the OpenTelemetry Java SDK, exploring its components, configuration, and advanced features to help you harness its full potential.

JMX metrics offer a powerful way to monitor and optimize Java application performance. In this blog, we’ll explore the types of JMX metrics you should keep an eye on when to check them, and how they help ensure your applications run smoothly and efficiently.

When it comes to monitoring Java applications, JMX (Java Management Extensions) plays a pivotal role. If you're looking to optimize your app’s performance, understand its behavior, and troubleshoot issues in real-time, JMX monitoring is a tool you'll want to understand inside and out.

Logs are a developer’s first line of defense when monitoring and troubleshooting distributed applications. They provide insights into performance, user behavior, and application stability, whether your application is written in Java or another language. However, when your applications scale up, and you have fragmented log data scattered across different systems, this will complicate your troubleshooting effort. This is what makes a centralized logging tool like SolarWinds Loggly essential.

During the development of your program, you might rely on simple println() statements to trace program execution flows and identify issues in your code. But as projects grow in size and complexity, print statements quickly become messy. A better approach to tracing program execution is logging, an approach that provides a consistent and organized way to track your application’s behavior, allowing you to systematically identify and resolve issues.

In Java programming, lambda expressions or Java one-liners have become widely adopted practices for writing concise and expressive code. These compact, anonymous functions introduce functional programming concepts to Java, streamlining operations on collections, simplifying data manipulation, and enhancing code readability. Introduced in Java 8, lambda expressions are designed to represent blocks of executable code.

Garbage collectors in Java, along with other programming languages such as C# and Python, are automated processes that run in the background to free up memory. Garbage collectors routinely identify and reclaim unused memory to stop memory leaks (unused objects still being referenced) and make applications more efficient and faster for end users.

Java is a flexible and commonly used programming language known for its platform independence, object-oriented design, and robustness. It was originally developed by Sun Microsystems (now owned by Oracle Corporation) in the mid-1990s and soon gained popularity due to its "Write Once, Run Anywhere" (WORA) principle, allowing developers to write code that can operate on any device or platform with a Java Virtual Machine (JVM).