Memory Pools¶

Uses the MemoryPoolMXBean provided by the JDK to monitor the sizes of java memory spaces such as perm gen, eden, old gen, etc.

Getting Started¶

To get information about memory pools in spectator just setup registration of standard MXBeans. Note, if you are building an app at Netflix this should happen automatically via the normal platform initialization.

import com.netflix.spectator.api.Spectator;
import com.netflix.spectator.jvm.Jmx;

Jmx.registerStandardMXBeans(Spectator.registry());

Metrics¶

jvm.memory.used¶

Gauge reporting the current amount of memory used. For the young and old gen pools this metric will typically have a sawtooth pattern. For alerting or detecting memory pressure the live data size is probably a better option.

Unit: bytes

Dimensions: see metric dimensions

jvm.memory.committed¶

Gauge reporting the current amount of memory committed. From the javadocs, committed is:

The amount of memory (in bytes) that is guaranteed to be available for use by the Java virtual machine. The amount of committed memory may change over time (increase or decrease). The Java virtual machine may release memory to the system and committed could be less than init. committed will always be greater than or equal to used.

Unit: bytes

Dimensions: see metric dimensions

jvm.memory.max¶

Gauge reporting the max amount of memory that can be used. From the javadocs, max is:

The maximum amount of memory (in bytes) that can be used for memory management. Its value may be undefined. The maximum amount of memory may change over time if defined. The amount of used and committed memory will always be less than or equal to max if max is defined. A memory allocation may fail if it attempts to increase the used memory such that used > committed even if used <= max would still be true (for example, when the system is low on virtual memory).

Unit: bytes

Dimensions: see metric dimensions

Metric Dimensions¶

All memory metrics have the following dimensions:

id: name of the memory pool being reported. The names of the pools vary depending on the garbage collector algorithm being used.
memtype: type of memory. It has two possible values: HEAP and NON_HEAP. For more information see the javadocs for MemoryType.