Profiling WebSphere Liberty

Took up the job to profile the application I am working on. As WAS Liberty is my favourite app server, wanted to do the profiling on that only.

Tried various tools like VisualVM, JProfiler etc. But even after lot of search couldn't find a good page describing how to enable the application for profiling. Looks like some JMX port configuration is required, didn't check further.

Then tried IBM Heath Center. Initially I was bit sceptical as a related IBM tool - 'Support assistant' is very heavy and had bad experience with it in the past.

But I was pleasantly surprised the way IHC was so easy to install and configure. And good thing, it works with IBM JDK out of the box :)

So below are the steps:

1) Install 'Health Center'

Install in Eclipse by using the update site: http://public.dhe.ibm.com/software/websphere/runtimes/tools/healthcenter/

There are other ways which are specified here: https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/java/jdk/tools/healthcenter/getting_started.html

2) Enable the application we need to profile, in our case the Liberty server.

In the Eclipse Liberty Server project, edit the jvm.options file, add following lines:

-Xhealthcenter:port=1973

-agentlib:healthcenter

Start the server. In the startup log you should see:  

INFO: Health Center agent started on port 1973. 

Port can vary as per your setup

3) Connect the health center

Open the HC perspective: Window -> Open Perspective > Health Center Status Summary

File -> New Connection...' . Specify the port mentioned in the log.

Start using the application and the agent will start collecting the information and display in neat interface.