Using Visualizer Tool bars

These buttons appear depending on the metric in the visualizer.

To enable you to work efficiently with multiple windows, the visualizers provide a simple means of marking selected items such as methods, types, objects, and classes, and then locating marked items in other windows, or in displays showing other monitoring metrics. The marking mechanism is based on names, so it works across different data files provided they contain items with matching names.

When you select an item in a display to mark (single-click the item with the left mouse button), click the Mark button in the tool bar, or Mark to Find in the Edit menu. Marking an item copies the name and/or other properties of the current item (highlighted by blue-green color) into the search pattern.

In the Edit menu there are two find options:

Find Immediately, which uses the current values in the search pattern (usually stored by the most recent Mark operation) or Find, which opens a dialog window that allows you to edit the search pattern before the search. You can also activate these commands via buttons from the tool bar.

The elements of the search pattern used for matching the items depend on the actual kind of items being searched (types, methods, objects, for example) and are a subset of the following list:

As a result of the search, all found items get selected. The first found item becomes the current item, and the window is scrolled automatically to make it visible. The remaining selected items, if any, are displayed on a light yellow background.

If there are multiple selected items, you can change the current item using Find Previous Selected and Find Next Selected from the Edit menu or use the appropriate buttons on the tool bar. These actions also automatically scroll the window.

You can also choose multiple selections manually by holding down the SHIFT key while clicking the mouse button to add a new item to the selected set.

Figure 8-24 Finding an Item

You can pause and resume graphical time-based scrolling by clicking the clock icon in the upper left corner just above the visualizer display area.

The following image shows a display that is running. Pressing the clock would pause the scrolling of the data. Pressing the clock again would allow the display to resume scrolling.

Figure 8-25 Using the Pause Clock

The GC viewer provides several ways for you to manipulate the breadth of the data in the specialized GC visualizer displays. You can

Select a Subset of the Available Data

To select a subset of data, click one location on the graph and drag the mouse cursor across the graph area from left to right until you have defined an area that you want to explore in more detail. Release the mouse button, and the screen repaints with the new interval filling the entire graphical area.

Using the View menu, you can choose whether to base the selection on the X axis, the Y axis , or both. The X axis is the default setting.

Figure 8-26 The View Menu Selections in the GC Viewer

To drill in further, repeat this method of defining the area of view until you reach your desired resolution.

Use the slider underneath the graph to view additional ranges in the data without changing the resolution interval.

The following images show a selected area on a graph and the resulting display.

Figure 8-27 Specialized GC Graph with Area Selected for Finer Resolution

Figure 8-28 New Resolution After Selection

Apply Selected Interval Across All Metrics

When you have your desired resolution in one metric visualizer, click the button to apply the selected time interval across all metrics in the GC viewer. This resolution will apply until the reset button is clicked or a new resolution is chosen.

Note that although the X-axis (Clock Time) has not changed from the previous figure, the graph automatically zooms in on the Y-axis to provide a more fine-grained view of the data points while in this mode.

Figure 8-29 Resolution After Interval Applied to All Metrics