In the world of software engineering, where innovation meets precision, yCrash emerges as a toolkit designed to enhance Java performance monitoring and diagnostics. A DevOps engineer, would delve into this article as a guide that shares the practical advantages of what yCrash offers. It speaks about how yCrash empowers developers with a seamless interface for fine-tuning Java applications, providing real-time insights, identifying memory leaks, and simplifying intricate code intricacies. From streamlining operations to empowering enterprises in competitive markets, it bridges complexity with practicality, infusing digital ventures with performance brilliance.
yCrash in the Landscape of APM Tools
In the realm of performance tools, yCrash stands distinct. It doesn’t aim to replace existing APM tools but rather to complement them. Tools like DataDog, Dynatrace, New Relic, and AppDynamics alert you when a production problem arises, showing metrics such as CPU spikes, memory degradation, or increased response times. However, these tools don’t pinpoint the exact line of code causing the CPU spike or the specific object leaking memory. That’s where yCrash steps in, enhancing your toolset with predictive insights and deep root cause analysis.
Comparison Matrix
| Feature | APM Tools (e.g., DataDog, Dynatrace, New Relic, AppDynamics) | yCrash |
| Supported Languages | Multiple languages (e.g., Java, Python, .NET, Node.js, Go, etc.) | JVM languages only (i.e., Java, Kotlin, Scala, etc.) |
| Identify Garbage Collection Issues? | ✔️ | ✔️ |
| Can Analyze JVM Dumps (GC logs, thread dumps, heap dumps, etc.)? | – | ✔️ |
| Forecast Outages by Monitoring Micro Metrics? | – | ✔️ |
| Identify Objects Causing Memory Leaks? | – | ✔️ |
| Diagnose Native Memory Leaks | – | ✔️ |
| Identify Causes for Long Garbage Collection Pauses? | – | ✔️ |
| Identify Lines of Code Causing CPU Spikes? | – | ✔️ |
| Identify Memory Over-Allocation or Under-Allocation? | – | ✔️ |
| Identify Outages caused dues to Kernel Problems? | – | ✔️ |
| Identify Issues Caused by Neighboring Processes? | – | ✔️ |
| Identify Deadlocks? | – | ✔️ |
| Identify BLOCKED Threads Issues? | – | ✔️ |
| Shift Left CI/CD Integration | – | ✔️ |
| Customer Premise Troubleshooting | – | ✔️ |
| Non-Intrusiveness | – (Operates within JVM, intercepts every single transaction) | ✔️ (Operates outside the JVM) |
| Is Cost Effective? | – (Collects large volumes of data, increasing costs) | ✔️ (Selectively captures essential data, reducing costs) |
As you can see from the comparison, traditional APM tools excel at providing broad coverage across the application stack, alerting you to general performance issues. However, they lack depth when it comes to analyzing JVM-specific problems or pinpointing root causes within the Java environment. This is where yCrash offers its distinct advantages, diving deeper into JVM metrics, offering proactive insights, and providing more cost-effective data management.
yCrash’s Capabilities
Now, let’s explore the key areas where yCrash enhances your toolset:
1. Tackling Hard JVM Problems: APM tools focus on surface-level metrics like response times, throughput, and error rates. While they’re good at raising alerts when performance degrades, they often can’t explain why it’s happening—especially when the root cause lies deep inside the JVM. That’s where yCrash comes in. It specializes in Java Virtual Machine internals, providing targeted analysis of GC logs, thread dumps, and heap dumps. These insights are critical for diagnosing memory leaks, thread contention, and Garbage Collection problems—issues that APM tools typically overlook. In fact, when it comes to challenging JVM problems like native memory leaks, long GC pauses, BLOCKED thread contention, and heap-level memory issues, even Java vendors like Oracle and IBM rely on our toolset to diagnose and resolve them.
2. Troubleshooting On-Premise Deployments: Many enterprises still deliver software that runs entirely on their customer’s premises. In such environments, traditional APM tools struggle to provide visibility, since they rely on instrumentation and continuous connectivity, both of which are often unavailable or restricted in customer-prem setups. yCrash solves this challenge with its 360° artifact capture. It collects GC logs, thread dumps, heap dumps, system metrics, and more, empowering you to troubleshoot critical issues even in locked-down environments. No need for agents or persistent access. This post explains how it works: The Hidden Battle: Troubleshooting Issues in On-Prem Customer Deployments
3. Forecast Production Incidents During Pre-Release Testing: Before every release, we run performance tests to validate CPU, memory, and response times. But these Macro-Metrics alone don’t reveal deeper risks. yc-360 script enables you to analyze Micro-Metrics like GC throughput, object allocation rate, socket usage, and thread pool behaviors. These overlooked Micro-metrics, signals early signs of instability, giving you a chance to identify the performance issues before they hit production.
4. Non-intrusive Observability:
Fig: yCrash performs non-intrusive monitoring
In contrast to conventional monitoring tools that operate within the JVM, often introducing significant performance overhead by intercepting every application call, yCrash takes a distinctly non-intrusive approach. Instead of intercepting calls, yCrash operates outside the JVM environment. It achieves this by reading and analyzing existing data that the JVM has already generated and stored on disk. Due to this, it adds only 0.05% overhead, and we’ve detailed the minimal overhead introduced by a yc-360 Script in this blog. This innovative strategy ensures that integrating yCrash has an imperceptible impact on your application’s performance, allowing it to operate seamlessly and efficiently.
5. 360° comprehensive root cause analysis:
Unlike conventional APM tools that often focus solely on the JVM runtime environment, yCrash adopts a holistic approach. Instead of confining analysis to just the JVM, yCrash considers an array of factors such as network interactions, storage utilization, kernel intricacies, neighboring processes, and even load averages. Additionally, yCrash’s unique ability to correlate diverse artifacts is a key advantage. By connecting threads’ behavior with network connections and precisely tracking CPU consumption through kernel tools like ‘top’, as well as identifying stolen CPU cycles from the container, we enhance the precision of root cause identification. This correlation-driven strategy equips you to swiftly and accurately address intricate performance issues, promoting optimized system functionality.
6. Securing Production Artifacts: In traditional troubleshooting workflows, multiple engineers handle sensitive artifacts like thread dumps and logs, often storing them across various locations, which poses significant security risks. yCrash addresses this issue by securely transmitting and archiving production dumps within your corporate network, ensuring that raw dumps are never exposed to engineers. With features like data masking to protect confidential information, incident retention to manage storage, SSO authentication for centralized access, and robust authorization controls, yCrash ensures that sensitive data is safeguarded throughout the troubleshooting process, reducing the risk of unauthorized access and potential data breaches. Read more about securing the troubleshooting process in here.
7. Integration and Extensibility: Out-of-the-box yCrash integrates with diverse monitoring tools (Prometheus, AppDynamics, Grafana, NewRelic, ELK, Dynatrace, and Instana), ticket tracking systems (JIRA, ServiceNow) and notification platforms (Google Chat, EMails, Page Duty, Slack, MS Teams). The yCrash platform offers user-friendly APIs, empowering you to effortlessly integrate with various technologies. This flexibility extends beyond conventional boundaries, allowing you to tailor and enhance yCrash’s functionality to precisely meet your unique requirements.
ROI Calculation
- Engineering Time Savings: yCrash dramatically reduces the time engineers spend analyzing dumps and pinpointing root causes in complex, multi-threaded applications. Suppose an organization handles 1,000 incidents per month across its applications, with each analysis traditionally taking around 5 hours. With a Performance Engineer’s hourly rate at $100 in the U.S., yCrash can save approximately USD $6 million annually (1,000 incidents x 5 hours/dump x $100/hour x 12 months) by automating root cause analysis and reducing troubleshooting time.
- Revenue Protection and Brand Reputation: yCrash minimizes prolonged downtime that can lead to revenue loss, customer dissatisfaction, and reputational damage. In incidents like the recent CrowdStrike outage, major sectors, including airlines, were disrupted, impacting both partners and customers. By quickly diagnosing issues, yCrash helps prevent such large-scale impacts, protecting revenue and brand reputation.
- Protection from Escalated Operational Consequences: Certain production outages can have severe repercussions, including escalated consequences like organizational changes or job losses. yCrash’s rapid problem isolation capabilities prevent such disruptions, allowing teams to resolve issues before they escalate to crisis levels. By maintaining operational continuity and team stability, yCrash supports a steady, resilient organizational environment and protects against the high-stakes impacts that can result from unmanaged production outages.
Customer Success Stories
- North American Major Trading Platform: This trading platform resolved severe CPU spikes caused by concurrency issues, using insights from this case study to reduce diagnostic time and avoid revenue-impacting downtime.
- Top 3 Global Bank: A critical middleware outage was isolated in record time, with a 50% reduction in troubleshooting time, cutting potential outage costs.
- Leading Global Travel Organization: The team resolved microservice issues quickly, improving response times and saving potential lost revenue in peak periods, as shared in this example.
- Apache Library Deadlock for a Tech Giant: yCrash quickly addressed a complex deadlock, significantly reducing manual analysis time as detailed in this story.
- Fortune 500 Retailer with Oracle Database Issues: The engineering team resolved Oracle DB-related unresponsiveness efficiently, saving hours and maintaining application stability as shown here.
- E-commerce Business on AWS: A 502 Bad Gateway error was resolved swiftly, reducing customer complaints and troubleshooting time, as described in this case study.
These stories showcase yCrash’s impact on saving time, reducing costs, and boosting efficiency across multiple industries.
Trusted By
yCrash toolset has been widely used by world premiere brands around the globe and these customers have been enhancing their performance and fixing the related issues using this toolset. Here are some of the happy customers who are currently using the product:
