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The three pillars of Observability are metrics, logs, and tracing. APM (Application Performance Monitoring) is the tool that provides Observability to your application. Over the last year I've listed the features that APM tools provide, covered the top 5 reasons for using APM, and explained the details of how the various Observability techniques fit together.

But amongst all that, I missed explaining that high level three pillar view:

• Metrics (and their associated Alerts): tell you that something went wrong, along with what the symptoms are for that something. This first step leads you to the next step to look into tracing where it went wrong ...
• (Distributed) Tracing: tells you roughly where it went wrong. Now that you know where, you can focus in to the details in the logs...
• Logging: Tells you exactly where it went wrong, and clues as to what went wrong.

The three pillars tells you that there is an issue, and let's you find and specify the issue. The next step of determining exactly what went wrong and how to fix it needs APM debugging/stack tracing/heap analysis/etc. Now on to all the usual newsletter list of links, tips, tools, news and articles, and as usual I've extracted all the tips into ( http://www.javaperformancetuning.com/news/newtips248.shtml ) this month's tips page

A note from this newsletter's sponsor

News

Java performance tuning related news

• Interesting study showing that focusing only on decreasing GC pause time can increase CPU overhead from the GC sufficiently to impact the application and actually make overall performance worse
• White-Box Performance-Influence Models: A Profiling and Learning Approach
• ZGC benchmarked with Cassandra showing better throughput and lower latency especially for outliers

Tools

Java performance tuning related tools

• A virtual size adjustable buffer wrapping multiple buffers as a single merged buffer
• if you need faster pseudo random numbers, this has one
• Walkthrough of using JFR and p6spy to profile your app with various types of problems

Articles

• Java Volatile (Jakob Jenkov/Jakob Jenkov)
• Why Java's TLABs are so important and why write contention is a performance killer in multicore environments (Sadiq Jaffer/opsian)
• Threading Safely in Java (Preslav Mihaylov/Java2Days)

Jack Shirazi

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