I downloaded a new Java tool today, called VisualVM which was released (version 1.0) yesterday and is going to ship with the SUN JDK starting with JDK 6 release 7.

This is a tool that allows you to view information about the java programs currently running on your computer (or a remote computer). It does not seem to provide as much information as JConsole or JManage, but it still gives the most essential information. Besides the tool is still pretty new (version 1.0), so I’m sure we will see lots of improvement in the near future.

Monitoring provides basic information about uptime, memory usage, threads and some other stuff:

The application also has a rudimentary profiler which allows you to see which methods are using cpu cycles, and which objects are hogging all the memory,

The program can also do a heap dump, allowing you to see the size and number of instances of each class. You can also inspect each and every object to view it’s variables and references:

The profiling part was pretty simple and would benefit from more work, but overall I’m pretty sure this tool(even though a bit low on features/information in it’s current state)  will be a big hit, and a good entry to profiling and application management to many people.

A very nice feature I did not take a screenshot of is a visual timeline view of all the threads and which state they are in, very smooth   The software is also suppose to let you view core dumps, but did not get a chance to test this feature tonight.