Introduction to jvmguard

What is jvmguard?

jvmguard monitors JVMs in production and adds low overhead to the monitored applications. It records two kinds of lightweight data: the timing of selected method invocations, called transactions, and scalar values such as heap usage or thread count, called telemetries. Based on that data, jvmguard can take a targeted profiling capture, for example a JFR recording, a heap dump or a thread dump, when a configured condition is met. The captured snapshots can be opened in JProfiler and other profilers for detailed analysis.

Captures can also be started manually from the UI or through the REST or MCP API. Every capture operation is recorded in an audit log. Access is controlled by three access levels: Admin, Profiler, and Viewer, so you can partition a single server for multiple teams.

jvmguard is intended to run with your application at all times. This enables it to keep historic data and show you how monitored values evolve over time. Data is automatically made less granular as it gets older, so you can look back over long periods of time with only a slow rate of storage space consumption.

jvmguard is designed to monitor multiple VMs at the same time. Whether you have a number of fixed VM installations or a cloud deployment with hundreds of VMs, jvmguard can monitor and organize them together.

The jvmguard UI is a web interface that can be used by multiple users to analyze the collected data at the same time.

How do I continue?

This documentation is intended to be read in sequence, with later help topics building on the content of previous ones.

First, a broad overview over the architecture will help you to understand the components of jvmguard.

The help topics on installing jvmguard and monitoring your VMs will get you up and running.

Following that, the discussion of basic concepts and the overview of the UI take you to a level of understanding where you can explore jvmguard on your own.

Subsequent chapters build your expertise with respect to different functionality in jvmguard. The “Configuration” and “Advanced topics” sections are optional readings that should be consulted if you need certain features.