VisualVM is intended to be a complete Java troubleshooting tool. It has well-integrated plugins that provide a somewhat improved version of the JConsole MBeans tab and that can embed any JConsole plugin as well. Additionally, VisualVM provides many other useful capabilities, including the ability to trigger and examine heap dumps, analyze core dumps, trigger stack dumps, graph memory and thread usage, and perform memory and CPU profiling.

VisualVM is bundled with the JDK starting with Java 6 Update 7, which is used on Windows, Solaris, and Linux systems.