I have considered a few tabs(features) of HP Diagnostics J2EE probe so that it can be comparable with VisualVM. Mostly HP Diagnostics J2EE probe is used for profiling J2EE applications.
| Parameter | VisualVM | HP Diagnostics - J2EE Probe |
Default monitor shows minimum CPU usage with both visualvm and j2ee probe on the same system |  |  |
| System Good system performance metrics are shown in the probe while these are not completely available in default visualvm (we can extend if we like..) |  |  |
| Heap VisualVM Heap graph is more informative at a glance. |  |  |
| Visual GC Probe is showing some GC activity while it is not visible in visualvm. May be as the GC collections per sec value is too low to be visible on the graph. |  |  |
| Threads Thread information is good and almost the same apart from an extra element - 'threads created per sec' present in probe. (this is useful during load tests) |  |  |
| Threaddump Thread dump gives info. related to all the threads where as we can have an option of selecting a specific thread and get its trace in probe. I think this is useful as thread dump increase largely with time and load. |  |  |
| VisualVM After 1 day Tomcat has been running since 1 day and VisualVM's Profiling is still going on. The changes observed are very minimal increase in CPU usage(either might be because of Tomcat or VisualVM). There is an increase in Heap usage and also observed some GC activities. A forced GC has been triggered later.(see graph 2) |  |  |
Next Steps..
1. Extending VisualVM to have http/xml interface so that it can run at one place but can be viewed from different locations. Also this feature helps to embed VisualVM's output into any tool which can parse XML. -- VisualVM ~ VirtualVM
2. Extending to J2EE
want to see what other visualvm explorers are thinking along with me -> http://java.sun.com/community/javavisualvm/
Nice one!
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