Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Since it first emerged, Java has had a phenomenal rise in usage and popularity. It’s ability to be robust and platform-independent has enabled it to rule the application development world by providing internet solutions for businesses across industries. Any organization that runs its mission-critical applications on Java shouldn’t be turning a blind eye towards understanding the importance of application performance monitoring.

Java is one of the most widely used programming languages and it’s often used by back-end developers as a server-side language. It’s used by über-famous applications like Spotify, Twitter, Signal, and Cash App. Java has evolved immensely over the years and in addition to being easy to write, compile, and debug, it’s also more secure, portable, and effective in memory management compared to other languages.

Today, almost any metric you can think of can be tracked down and reported, as opposed to the past when the software was traditionally provided in boxes and its performance in production could not be predicted. The issues we are currently facing are not due to a lack of information, but rather to an abundance and scale of information. This becomes significantly more difficult to manage when dozens or even hundreds of servers are in use.

We are constantly working on contributing monitoring support for various sources, the latest in that line is support for Tomcat monitoring using the JMX Receiver in the OpenTelemetry collector. If you are as excited as we are, take a look at the details of this support in OpenTelemetry’s repo. You can utilize this receiver in conjunction with any OTel collector: including the OpenTelemetry Collector and observIQ’s distribution of the collector.

Write enough programs, and you’ll agree that it’s impossible to write an exception-free program, at least in the first go. Java debugging is a major part of the coding process, and knowing how to debug your code efficiently can make or break your day. And in Java applications, understanding and leveraging stack traces can be the game-changer you need to ship your application quickly. This article will cover how to debug in Java and how Java stack traces simplify it.

The Java Management Extensions (JMX) framework is a well-known tool for any experienced Java developer. The purpose of the JMX framework is to simplify the management of local and remote Java applications while providing a user-friendly interface. The primary advantages of the JMX framework are that it’s highly reliable, scalable, and easy to configure. However, it’s also known for introducing the concept of MBeans, which unlocks the capacity for real-time Java application management.

For developers who’ve created their own instrumentation with the Java Agent plugin, the next phase of the process is regression testing. By performing regression testing, you can ensure that your plugin functions the way it’s supposed to after you’ve made code changes or updates. You’ll have your own plugin, but to illustrate regression testing in this article, I’ll use the plugin in our example repo.