Real-time profiling for Java using JFR metrics

With New Relic's real-time profiling for Java using Java Flight Recorder (JFR) metrics, you can run continuous, always-on profiling of your Java code in production environments. The accompanying JVM cluster timeline view provides a fast and intuitive way to diagnose cluster-wide performance problems. For example, you can quickly see how an application’s deployment affects the overall health of the cluster.

Find performance bottlenecks

Troubleshooting performance bottlenecks in your Java application or service can help you better understand the following:

• Where you’re wasting resources
• When an incident occurs
• What happened during an incident
• What performance issues led up to an incident

To make troubleshooting faster and easier, you need to see the high fidelity runtime characteristics of your code running on the JVM, and you need that data in real time.

JFR daemon

The New Relic JFR daemon runs as its own Java process and monitors a JVM for JFR events over remote JMX. Using the New Relic Java telemetry SDK as the underlying implementation, the JFR daemon converts JFR events into New Relic telemetry types and reports them to New Relic's metric and event ingest APIs.

On startup the JFR daemon checks if the application you are monitoring is also being monitored by the New Relic Java agent.

• If the Java agent is present, then the daemon will obtain the entity GUID associated with the application. Both the JFR data and the data collected by the agent will then report to the same APM entity.
• If the the Java agent is not detected, then the daemon will report as a unique entity under the app name that you configured for it.

Requirements

Requirements include:

• Java 8 (version 8u262+) or higher for both the JFR daemon process, and the application process
• An Insights insert API key or an APM license key.
• JFR daemon jar.
• Required for flamegraphs, otherwise optional but recommended: Install of New Relic Java agent version 6.1.0 or higher on your JVM. The JFR daemon can run without a Java agent being included, but if the Java agent is present it will combine agent and daemon data into a single APM application.

Installation

The application that you wish to monitor with the JFR daemon must be configured to expose JFR data over remote JMX by adding the following system properties:

-Dcom.sun.management.jmxremote
-Dcom.sun.management.jmxremote.port=1099
-Dcom.sun.management.jmxremote.ssl=false
-Dcom.sun.management.jmxremote.authenticate=false

To use the JFR daemon:

1. Download the latest version of the JFR daemon jar: jfr-daemon-n.n.n.jar.

2. Register an Insert API key or an APM license key for publishing data to New Relic.

3. Required: Assign your key to the INSIGHTS_INSERT_KEY environment variable. If you are using an APM license key then you will also need to set the USE_LICENSE_KEY=true environment variable.

4. Recommended: Set the name of the application being monitored to the NEW_RELIC_APP_NAME environment variable. If this is not set, then the default app name will be used instead.

5. Start your application and the JFR daemon:

   java -jar jfr-daemon-n.n.n.jar

   コピー

Optional (but recommended): Include the Java agent:

1. Install Java agent version 6.1.0 or higher to monitor your application.

2. Configure the Java agent to allow it to communicate with the JMX daemon by adding the following configuration to the newrelic.yml configuration file:

   jmx:
       enabled: true
       linkingMetadataMBean: true

   コピー

View your data

To view your data, go to one.newrelic.com > Explorer > (select service) > More Views > Realtime Profiling Java.

Understand JVM cluster behavior over time

The JVM cluster timeline view shows the JVM behavior across your entire cluster. This timeline enables quicker troubleshooting and issue detection; for example, at a glance you can see:

• How a recent deployment affected the rest of the JVM cluster
• When a JVM restarted
• How an individual instance was affected by its noisy neighbor

To make troubleshooting easier, you need to see the high fidelity runtime characteristics of your code running on the JVM, and you need that data in real time.

Each row of the timeline represents a specific JVM over time. Inside each row, a box represents a 5-minute period of that JVM’s life. From least severe to most severe, yellow, orange, and red traffic lights indicate anomalous behavior for a JVM, so you can drill down into that instance and the right time period when investigating errors or other performance issues.

JVM details

The details panel for each JVM provides several critical views:

• How resources are allocated within a process
• How garbage collection affects performance
• How to track garbage collection with logs
• How CPU is used

Identify resource intensive code paths using flamegraphs

Requirements:

• Early access to our flamegraphs feature is available upon request. All other real-time profiling features are available by default. To request this early access, please email flamegraph@newrelic.com.
• At this time, this requires deployment of both the JFR daemon and Java agent and the daemon must be reporting as the same entity as the agent.

Use flamegraphs to identify the Java classes and methods that are most frequently executed in your application code. By using flamegraphs to optimize the hot spots in your code you can reduce resource consumption and increase your application’s overall performance.