Mission Control 3.1 - New and Noteworthy

Table of Contents

Management Console

Improved MBean drilling

The MBean Browser can now drill infinitely deep down into MBean attributes consisting of CompositeData, TabularData, Collections and arrays.

Improved dials

The dials on the Overview Tab shows the current and maximum value. The background gradient and how values are formatted can be configured by the user. It's also possible to add new dials to the dashboard.

MBean and attribute filtering

The MBean Tree and the Attribute Selector Dialog can be filtered using a wildcard expression.

Import/export trigger rules

You can now import and export trigger rules from and to the local file system, either by using the import/export wizard in the file menu or by clicking on the import/export button on the Triggers Tab.

Improved MBean Browser Tree configuration

Settings have been added for configuring how MBean names should be presented in the MBean Browser Tree.

GC Pause Time

The total pause time for the last garbage collection can be viewed in the Memory Tab.

MBean registration/unregistration

The MBean Tree is refreshed when a new MBean is registered or unregistered on the monitored MBeanServer. Automatic refresh of the tree can be turned on/off using a toolbar button on top of the MBean Tree.

Thread CPU Usage

The Threads Tab shows how much CPU usage a thread uses, as a percentage of the total CPU usage on all cores.

Trigger templates for WLS and JRockit

The Triggers Tab now contains a set of default rules that can serve as templates when creating triggers for JRockit or WebLogic 10.3.

Triggers description

When you create a new trigger you can now add a description and format the text using <B>, <LI> and <BR>-tags.

MBean metadata

The MBean Browser Tab now shows MBean metadata.

Toolbar navigation

The tabs in the Management Console have been splited up into four groups: General, MBean, Runtime and Advanced, and a toolbar has been added so the user can navigate between the different groups. Tabs that have been added using the Mission Control tab extension point will be put in a fifth group called Other.

Diagnostic Commands Tab

The Management Console has a tab called Diagnostic Commands that allows the power user to execute Ctrl-break handlers from a remote machine over JMX.

Garbage collection button

The Memory Tab contains a toolbar button for triggering a full garbage collection on the JVM that is being monitored.

JVM Browser

Test connection

In the New Connection Wizard a connection can be tested - to ensure that host name, port, password etc. are correct - before it is added to JVM Browser Tree.

User configurable application names

The user can now, by using a set of naming rules, give discovered Java-applications human readable names in the JVM Browser.

General

Accessibility support

The Management Console, the JRockit Runtime Analyzer and the JVM Browser now have better support for keyboard navigation. Custom widgets in Mission Control, like graphs and pie charts, now provide information for screen readers. Graphs and dials in the Management Console Overview can also be rendered as tables by changing accessibility options in Preference Dialog.

Links to Mission Control forum and home page

To help the user to find further assistance and information about Mission Control, the help menu now contains links to the Mission Control Forum and Home Page.

Better support for Copy and Paste

Copy and Paste now work for all tables and trees in the Management Console, the JRockit Runtime Analyzer and for the Properties View. Settings for turning column headers on/off and for indenting columns when copying trees have been added.

JRockit Runtime Analyzer (JRA)

New recording templates

There are four new templates in the JRA-recording wizard. The "Full Recording"-template is the default one and it will try to gather as much information as possible without worrying too much about the overhead. The "Minimal Overhead Recording"-template will try to minimize overhead even if it means that some data will not be recorded. The "Real Time Recording"-template is the one to slect when you are use JRockit Real Time, as it will omit some data that provoke garbage collections when collected. For older versions of JRockit, which lacks the support for recording latency related information or that uses a JDK 1.4, which does not support file transfers back to Mission Control, there is a template called "Classic Recording".

Toolbar navigation

The tabs in the Runtime Analyzer have been splitted up into six groups: General, Memory, Code, Threads/Locks, Latency and Other and a toolbar has been added so the user can navigate between the different groups.

General Tab

There is a new overview tab that presents an aggregated view of selected data from the whole recording graphically.

Code Overview Tab

There is a new overview tab for code related information that shows in what packages and classes the application spent the most time executing.

System Tab

There is a new System Tab that shows JVM and OS-related information.

Recording Tab

There is a new Recording Tab that shows the start time of the recording and the recording parameters used.

GC Statistics Tab

The GC General tab has been renamed to GC Statistics and it now contains more detailed information about GC pauses and GCs.

Allocation Tab

There is a new tab that shows thread local area (TLA) information and the ratio between the number of bytes allocated by small and large objects in the application. It is now also possible to see how much memory each thread has allocated during the recording.

Threads/Locks Overview Tab

There is a new overview tab showing information about threads, locks and CPU usage.

Thread Tab

There is a new tab that shows the threads that were running during the recording.

Latency Overview Tab

There is a new overview tab displaying latencies categorized by type. The tab also shows which Java locks the application were blocked on the most.

Latency Thread Tab

There is a new tab that shows the total and average latency per thread.

Latency Histogram Tab

The Event Value Histogram folder in the Latency Log Tab has moved to separate tab called the Histogram Tab and a details part, that shows the traces for all events that have a certain event value, has been added. This can be useful when trying to find out where in the application there has been contention on a lock.

Occupied Heap

An Occupied Heap data series, which shows the amount of memory after a garbage collection, has been added to GC Event Tab.

Improved threads tooltips

The tooltip for a thread in the Latency Graph now shows start and end time for the thread, the thread id and the total allocation rate.

Improved Tooltips for pie charts

The tooltips for pie charts displays more detailed information about each slice.

Configurable tab navigator

The position of tab navigator (category toolbar) can now be configured by the user.

Eclipse Integration

Tab extension point

There are now extension points that allow third parties to extends the Management Console with tabs, trigger rules and triggers actions.

PDE wizards

Eclipse Wizards for creating classes, that can use the new extension points exposed by Mission Control, have been added.

API

New public API:s

The RJMX-API, which is an extension of JMX that Mission Control uses to subscribe to JMX-data and to establish connections to local/remote servers, is now open for public use. The API also includes classes that allow communication with JRockit JDK 1.4, which relies on a JRockit specific protocol instead of JMX. Accompanying the RJMX-API is two Eclipse-plug-ins which exposes API-functionality that can be used to extend Mission Control and create dials, tables and charts similar to the ones found in Mission Control today.