Observability Beyond the Three Pillars — Continuous Profiling With Alibaba Dragonwell

Observability is essential for a cloud-native environment, generally described as having three pillars: logs, metrics, and tracing. While these three elements are important to understand your service, profiling, as an additional signal, is also crucial to help you to get more insights about the behavior of your application. JFR, as a low-overhead profiling technology implemented in OpenJDK, is a great foundation tool to build observability for Java.

In this talk, Sanhong will start with an introduction to the fundamentals of JFR and then go into the details of how we use the JFR technology at scale in Alibaba Cloud. He will describe how they develop the features based on JFR in Alibaba Dragonwell for supporting continuous profiling and then discuss how they use the ability of continuous profiling to resolve problems in the real world. While your situations are different, the thought process they went through could be helpful for you too.