Introduction to BitDive’s code-level continuous profiling for Java

What is BitDive?

BitDive is a cutting-edge performance profiling tool that offers a new integrated, flexible, and low-overhead approach to application profiling. Unlike traditional Java profiling methods (JVM-based), BitDive leverages a library-based method, making it developer-friendly and well-suited for modern application architectures and development practices.

BitDive addresses a wide range of enterprise use cases including low-overhead continuous profiling, real-time monitoring, and error tracking, providing deep code-level insights combined with production-safe operation. BitDive is designed to be resource-efficient, easy to operate and scale, requires no code changes, and works seamlessly across all codebases.

Why BitDive?

The library-based instrumentation approach allows BitDive to stand out from traditional Java profilers such as JProfiler, YourKit and VisualVM, providing low-overhead continuous profiling and is well-suited for root cause analysis and performance optimization in distributed and cloud-native architectures.

Despite offering the ultimate level of identifying low-level JVM issues, the JVM-based profiling tools are likely to cause:

• Complex setup procedures with JVM startup parameters
• JVM restarts for configuration changes
• Performance overhead
• Limited data collection details for root cause analysis (lack of method input arguments, return values, and error messages)
• Struggle with distributed system monitoring
• Limited integration with CI/CD pipelines

👉 You can find a detailed comparison here (Comparison: BitDive vs. Traditional Profilers)

Application Performance Monitoring (APM) solutions address some of these shortcomings but create a new set of challenges such as:

• Lack or limited code-level tracing, usually focus on high-level transactions and external behaviors
• Usually require JVM restarts for configuration changes
• Lack or limited support for custom methods (limited to some popular frameworks or libraries)
• While deep code-level tracing can be achievable, it demands considerable effort to set up tracking (usually custom-instrumentation)

💪BitDive offers the best of both worlds by combining the capabilities of traditional Java profilers with modern observability and monitoring systems, without compromising on resource consumption, support for distributed systems, or level of detail.

Key Features

• Integration via simple Maven dependency addition in pom.xml and minimal configuration through a YAML file
• Easy setup with zero code changes (auto-instrumentation)
• No JVM restart required for configuration changes
• Designed for ease of use, making it approachable for developers with varying skill levels
• Supports long-term, continuous profiling in production environments
• Low (very low) overhead due to in-process monitoring
• Optimized support for microservices and distributed systems
• Support multithreading and asynchronous task monitoring
• Detailed application-level metrics including:
  • method input arguments, return values for rapid root cause analysis and performance optimization
  • error information for real-time monitoring and debugging
  • database queries for a lot more insights
• Built-in tools for performance analysis and application visualization:
  • Automatic dependency mapping for modeling application services
  • Call tree visualization to illustrate method invocation sequences
  • Flame Graphs to identify bottlenecks within the call hierarchy for optimization
• Supports selective monitoring for specific modules or services
• Well-suited for scaling in containerized and cloud-native applications
• Works well with modern development practices (CI/CD, microservice architecture)

Next Steps

👉 Continue with the Quickstart guide to setup and run BitDive in your environment

👉 Jump directly to the (Comparison: BitDive vs. Traditional Profilers) to learn more about BitDive’s main advantages over traditional Java profilers