New Relic, Inc., the leading software-as-a-service provider of application performance management (APM) solutions, today announced that its flagship product RPM has become the first APM tool to offer live thread profiling for production Java web applications. By combining application monitoring and troubleshooting with on-demand thread profiling, RPM now enables Java web application deployment teams to diagnose performance bottlenecks to the exact line of code, without paying the performance penalty typically associated with profilers.

"This is a breakthrough capability that confirms RPM’s effectiveness as a go-to performance management solution for operations and development teams," said Lew Cirne, New Relic founder and CEO. "As more and more IT teams adopt agile practices, developers are playing a greater role in application deployment and management. It’s important that they not only have tools that allow them to collaborate with their operations colleagues on production monitoring, but also to quickly see into application code when needed. Production profiling makes it easier to remediate specific threading issues or to ensure that the application and the underlying code are optimized for peak performance."

"We work with clients that are deploying business-critical applications and the solutions we deliver for them meet very high standards for performance and availability," said Otis Gospodnetic, founder of Sematext, a leading consulting and development services provider of enterprise-class search technology solutions based on Apache Lucene. "The performance management capabilities provided by New Relic RPM allow us to work closely with these organizations to monitor application health and availability, identify potential issues, and make ongoing improvements. Additionally, the new thread profiling feature can make it even easier to optimize the application at the code level and ensure that its meeting business and performance goals."

With the simple push of a button, RPM can record executing threads for a specified length of time in a live application, even while continuing to monitor performance. When the thread profiling session is completed, RPM provides a call stack and reports the call frequency for each thread in the stack. Because performance issues in multi-threaded applications can be associated with the timing of events, a thread trace provided by a profiler can offer a deeper and more comprehensive understanding of an application’s behavior. RPM profiling results may indicate problems with application code or with code executing in some of the application stack such as the application server, JVM, or application middleware and frameworks.

Until now, profiling has typically been used prior to deployment as part of the application testing process because traditional profiling tools can introduce excessive performance overhead, which will slow the running application and impact the user experience. New Relic RPM is a production web application performance management solution and is now the first APM tool to provide real-time thread profiling, enabling development teams to find performance bottlenecks at the code level, uncover flaws in the application stack (virtual machine, app server, integration middleware, and more), reduce CPU utilization, and improve transaction response time, all without the negative side effects seen in traditional solutions.

Production profiling is available immediately at no additional charge for customers who have subscribed to RPM to manage Java applications. Until September 1, 2010 it will be included in all subscription levels of RPM including the free RPM Lite version. After September 1, it will be a feature of RPM Silver, Gold and Enterprise versions. Learn more about this feature.

About New Relic RPM

New Relic RPM is an on-demand performance management solution for web applications developed in Ruby, Java or JRuby. New Relic RPM is fully implemented in minutes and provides deep, 24x7 visibility and code-level diagnostics for web applications deployed on traditional, dedicated infrastructures, private and public clouds, or any combination thereof. RPM’s real-time metrics enable application owners, developers and operations teams to quickly and cost effectively monitor, troubleshoot, and tune application performance. Learn more about RPM and subscribe