Understanding the summary page - Amazon CodeGuru Profiler

Understanding the summary page

The Amazon CodeGuru Profiler summary page displays the status of your profiling group and relevant metrics gathered during profiling. The metrics shown are for any data gathered in the last 12 hours, up to the beginning of the current UTC hour.

Most information is only displayed while the profiling group is enabled. If a profiling group is disabled, or becomes inactive, then metrics and reports are not shown. You can view the following elements in the summary page.

To view the summary page, go to the CodeGuru Profiler console and choose Profiling groups in the navigation bar. Then select the profiling group that you want to view.

Profiling group status

This is the latest general information regarding the status of the profiling group.

CPU summary

The CPU utilization gives an indication of how much of the instance’s CPU resources are consumed by the profiled application. For JVM applications, this gives a percentage of system CPU resources consumed by the JVM. The metric value is an average across all instances reporting data to this profiling group.

A low value (for example < 10%) indicates your application does not consume a large amount of the system CPU capacity. This means there could be an opportunity to use smaller instances or autoscaling to reduce cost, as long as there is nothing else running on the system. A high value (>90%) indicates your application is consuming a large amount of system CPU capacity. This means there is likely value in looking at your CPU profiles and recommendations for areas of optimization. The values are averages over the last full 12 hours.

The Agent CPU usage provides an estimate of how much of the system CPU resources are consumed by the CodeGuru Profiler agent on average across profiled instances. It’s expected that this value is low (<1%); however, it can be normal for this to be higher depending on the application being profiled. If the number concerns you, please get in touch with AWS Support, or provide feedback at the bottom of the page.

The Time spent executing code is a measure of how frequently your application’s JVM threads were in the RUNNABLE thread state, as a percentage of all thread states except IDLE.

A high percentage (>90%) indicates most of your application’s time is spent executing operations on the CPU. A very low percentage (<1%) indicates that most of your application was spent in other thread states (e.g. BLOCKED or WAITING) and there may be more value in looking at the Latency visualization, which displays all non-IDLE thread states, instead of the CPU visualization.

Latency summary

The Time spent blocked is a measure of how often your threads are in the BLOCKED state, once we exclude all IDLE threads. This can happen if your application makes frequent use of synchronized blocks or monitor locks. The Latency visualization can help you understand what sections of code are causing threads to block.

Time spent waiting is a measure of how much time your application’s thread spent in the WAITING and TIMED WAITING thread states, as a percentage of all thread states except IDLE. This is frequently caused by I/O operations such as network calls or disk operations. The Latency visualization can help you understand which sections of code are causing threads to wait.

Heap usage

The Average heap usage shows how much of your application’s maximum heap capacity is consumed by your application on average across all profiled instances. The percentage shown is the average heap space used compared to the JVM’s maximum heap capacity, with the absolute value for the average heap space used shown next to it.

A high percentage (>90%) could indicate that your application is close to running out of memory most of the time. If you wish to optimize this, then the Heap summary visualization shows you the object types consuming the most space on the heap. A low percentage (<10%) may indicate that your JVM is being provided much more memory than it actually requires and cost savings may be available by reducing your system memory size, although you should check the peak usage too.

The Peak heap usage metric shows the highest percentage of memory consumed by your application seen by the CodeGuru Profiler agent. This is based on the same dataset as seen in the Heap summary visualization. A high percentage (>90%) could indicate that your application has high spikes of memory usage, especially if your average heap usage is low.

Choose Visualize heap to see your application's heap usage over time. For information on understanding the heap summary, see Understanding the heap summary.

Anomalies

CodeGuru Profiler discovers anomalies by analyzing trends in your profiling data and detecting deviations in that data. Any anomalies found are shown here along with details of which time period is anomalous. Further details can be found in the linked report.

Recommendations

CodeGuru Profiler makes recommendations that you can use to optimize your applications. Any recommendations available are shown here along with details of the estimated impact on your overall application profile. Further details can be found on the linked report.