The IBM Monitoring and Diagnostic Tools for Java - Dump Analyzer (Dump Analyzer) is a tool that helps you determine the cause of a Java application failures using an operating system level dump. It provides individual analyzers which produce specific data in answer to specific questions. It links combinations of these analyzers together to produce a report of any problem causes and the application status.
Using Dump Analyzer will help you easily and quickly diagnose typical problems such as:
Out of memory
Deadlocks
Java Virtual Machine (JVM) or Java Native Interface (JNI) crashes
Dump Analyzer will attempt to detect and diagnose any problems found in a system dump and if it cannot, it will provide a report containing information from the dump. The report consists of three main sections:
Observations: Any potential problems detected in the dump. This may be empty if the analyzer can not identify a specific problem.
Analysis results: Information produced by the analyzer such as state and details of every thread, stack details, class loader details and memory information.
Errors: Any errors that prevented the analyzer from completing its analysis.
Dump Analyzer uses the Diagnostic Tooling Framework for Java (DTFJ) to access the information in the dump. DTFJ is a technology provided by IBM to read the contents of a system dump and provide access to most process-level and JVM-level entities contained in the dump. Using the DTFJ API, Dump Analyzer is able to access details of process threads, Java threads, Java classes, Java objects, Java monitors etc
Dump Analyzer provides:
A set of analyzers which allow you to interrogate particular aspects of the dump
General scripts which links key analyzers together
Analysis modules can be run individually
An extensible framework so you can write new analysis modules or scripts.
Dump Analyzer is delivered in the IBM Support Assistant (ISA) Workbench. ISA is a free software offering which provides a single point of access for the IBM Monitoring and Diagnostic Tools for Java. When new versions of the tools become available ISA notifies you and helps you retrieve the latest version. Using ISA helps you troubleshoot and fix problems in your Java application.
Dump Analyzer is installed within the IBM Support Assistant Workbench. To install Dump Analyzer follow the steps in the technote How to Install and Run Tools through the IBM Support Assistant. Whilst following the instructions in the technote please note that in the Tools Add-ons popup Dump Analyzer is listed under the 'JVM-based Tools' folder as 'IBM Monitoring and Diagnostic Tools for Java - Dump Analyzer'
