Profiling tools, or profilers, are software tools used by application developers to investigate and identify characteristics of and issues in the code. Profiling tools are also useful in identifying performance problems. Profiling tools answer questions like what JVM parameters are set, what the status of the heap memory is, what the generation-based classification of memory utilization is, which threads are active, and so on. Some profilers also track methods in the code to understand how frequently SQL statements are called, or how frequently web services are called.

Similar to application performance monitoring tools, many profiling tools are available on the market. VisualVM, JConsole, and HeapAnalyzer are a few of them. We will discuss each of the profiling tools in detail in the following sections.