Keeping track of how your system reacts to different types of influences is imperative when you're testing it, tuning it, and over time in production. The measured values are extremely useful for both technical and business trend analysis as well as for comparing the performance between releases. When done correctly, these trends and comparisons can save your organization a lot of headache and enable it to quickly predict and adapt to upcoming problems.

There are explicit tools that monitor specific features and services, and there are others that give a more collective view of system health and performance. As we have seen, tools such as VisualVM can provide us with a multitude of information from various layers in the enterprise stack. It will give you the basic information about the hardware in terms of CPU usage, and as expected, it will provide a lot of information about the JVM as well as the middleware and the execution of inherent applications within the JVM.

A system that...