SA-Plugin for VisualVM
We all know Serviceability Agent - a great debugging tool for troubleshooting HotSpot VM problems.
Now Serviceability Agent is also available in VisualVM through SAPlugin. More deatils here:
https://visualvm.dev.java.net/saplugin.html
I came across a related article in the Java Magazine. Is there enough documentation about SA ? The alternative is the source code for the Visual VM plugin. You also mentioned in the article that SA can help us understand HotSpot better. Did you mean that we have to code using SA to understand it ?
You can find some documentation on the SA at the following links:
http://openjdk.java.net/groups/hotspot/docs/Serviceability.html
https://www.usenix.org/legacy/events/jvm01/full_papers/russell/russell_html/index.html
and also in the HotSpot repository:
http://hg.openjdk.java.net/jdk7/hotspot/hotspot/file/9b0ca45cd756/agent/doc
And yes, by debugging/troubleshooting Java processes/core files with the SA we can get insight into the different sub-systems of the HotSpot JVM.