The IBM® Monitoring and Diagnostic Tools for Java™ - Dump Analyzer (referred to hereafter as the Dump Analyzer) is intended to perform automated analysis of dump files produced by the IBM Java VM. Starting with the name of the dump to be analyzed the analysis will attempt to localise the problem and if successful will produce a diagnosis of the error together with sufficient information to fix it or suggestions on how to continue the analysis using other tools (e.g. Memory Analyzer to diagnose out of memory situations). If localization fails then the tool will default to producing summary information from the dump intended to aid further diagnosis.
The Java language has come to be predominant in software development, and thus the reliability of the Java Virtual Machine (VM) has become a very important issue. The VM is typically a reliable piece of software, but of course failures do occur during execution for a variety of reasons. A small number of these problems are due to errors in the VM itself; however, in the majority of cases, they are due to errors or misconfigurations in the software stack above the VM (in WebSphere™ Application Server, for instance) or in the application itself.
The software stack for a typical projects has increased in complexity as information technology has matured, which has led to increasing difficulties for developers trying to determination the causes of problems. In such a complex environment, you may be faced with an overwhelming excess of information with which to diagnose the fault. In a production environment there may well be many gigabytes of heap, hundreds of threads, thousands of classloaders, tens of thousands of classes, and a huge number of objects.
The Dump Analyzer is an extensible framework that seeks to solve this problem for the IBM Java SDK's. It uses analyzers to interrogate a formatted system dump (each analyzer asking the dump a specific question) and links them together with a script to produce a concise report of the analysis. Typical problems analyzed might be the following.
The aim is to diagnose the correct category of problem and either provide a complete diagnosis of the problem or give some information designed to aid diagnosis together with a recommended next course of action.