Set up IBM Health Center to collect performance data

IBM Health Center for Java is a low-overhead agent that collects Java configuration and performance data. The data that is collected includes CPU usage, native memory usage, method profiling, garbage collection, locks, threads, and more.

When the agent is configured in headless mode, it continuously collects performance data into Health Center (.hcd) files. This data is valuable not only for performance tuning, but it also serves as a performance 'flight recorder' for root cause analysis of production incidents.

There are different methods to setting up IBM Health Center, depending on the type of environment.