IBM's Java Diagnostics, part 5th

Optimizing Applications with Health Center

Quickly and easily fix performance problems, identify configuration issues, and monitor Java applications

Introduction: IBM Monitoring and diagnostic tools for java™-Health Center is a tool for monitoring a running Java application. It provides a comprehensive report on the health of the system through graphs, graphs, and tables, and advises on how to fix the problem. Health Center contains a very inexpensive method configuration program (Profiler), a garbage collection visualizer, and a locking configuration program that identifies contention bottlenecks and includes a configuration browser. Learn how to use this tool to diagnose and repair performance, configuration, and stability issues in your application.

What causes my application to produce performance problems? If I am not a performance expert, how can I fix these problems? Is my application stable? Does it have a reasonable configuration? IBM monitoring and diagnostic tools for Java-health Center is a new tool designed to answer these and other related issues. It examines garbage collection behavior, method execution, application synchronization, and configuration. In addition to providing the information you need for problem diagnosis, the Health Center expert system solves your problem by providing analysis, labeling the area, providing recommendations and recommending the appropriate command line. Health Center is a very lightweight tool that can even be used for production. This article describes how to download and install Health Center, and how to use it to troubleshoot and troubleshoot your application.

Getting Started with Health Center

The Health Center tool contains two parts: client and agent. The agent sends information from the monitored JVM to the client. The client connects to the broker and displays the health status of the running Java application in a GUI.

JVM Requirements

Health Center is designed to run on a Java 5 or later IBM JVM. It requires a Java version of at least Java 5 Service Refresh 8 or Java 6 Service Refresh 1. For production purposes, you need the Java 5 Service refresh 10 or Java 6 Service Refresh 5.

Install Client

The Health Center client is part of IBM Support Assistant (ISA). To install the client, follow these steps:

Download and install ISA Workbench.

Start the ISA Workbench, select Update > Find New from the menu bar ... > Tools add-ons.

Enter Health in the search box of the Find new Tools Add-ons Wizard, and then expand Twistie next to jvm-based tools to display the health Center entry, as shown in Figure 1.

Figure 1. Installing the Health Center client in ISA