Introduction to the Flight Recorder

At its most basic, JFR is a rotating buffer of diagnostics and profiling data that is always available, on demand. You might consider it a sort “time machine” that enables you to go back in time to gather diagnostics data leading up to an event. The data stored in the rotating buffer includes JVM and application events. Since JFR is always-on using the default configuration will not result in any performance overhead.

This topic is comprised of the following subtopics:

• Flight Recorder Benefits

• How the Flight Recorder Works

• Flight Recorder Architecture

• Definition of Terms