A peek into the black box - how to adopt Java Flight Recorder to improve non-functional testing

Troubleshooting of Java applications becomes easier with OpenJDK 11, as Java Mission Control and Java Flight Recorder tools are now open for use to anyone.

There are however less obvious applications where these can shine as well. It is not only low footprint of JFR on running JVM but also a toolset that is available to programmatically perform analysis of results that make JMC/JFR a perfect tandem for automated collection and processing of JVM metrics during non-functional testing in CI/CD pipelines.

During this presentation, an approach will be presented to conduct performance and capacity testing with JFR. We will show how JMC API can be used to identify bottlenecks in Java services and how one can measure trends in performance/capacity of a service across multiple releases. Finally we will propose an approach to build Machine Learning based models on top of JFR data to estimate cluster capacity.