Automate java performance troubleshooting with AI-Powered thread dump analysis on Amazon ECS and EKS

Automate java performance troubleshooting with AI-Powered thread dump analysis on Amazon ECS and EKS Overview of the solution Prerequisites Walkthrough Step 1: Deploying the base infrastructure Step 2: Setting up container environment and deploy the monitoring and analysis stack Implementation details Design principles JMX metrics with Spring Boot Automated thread dump collection via Grafana webhook AI-powered analysis with Amazon Bedrock Triggering a thread dump analysis Example Analysis Output Cleaning up Conclusion About the authors Picture this: your containerized Java application that was running smoothly yesterday is now consuming 90% CPU and barely responding to user requests. Now your customers are experiencing timeouts, and your ops team is under pressure to resolve the issue quickly. When debugging unresponsive applications or excessive CPU consumption, one of the most valuable diagnostic tools available is the thread dump. A thread dump provides a snapshot of the threads in a Java Virtual Machine (JVM) at a specific moment, revealing thread states, stack traces, and lock information. While thread dumps are essential for diagnosing complex performance issues, traditional thread dump analysis presents several challenges. Analyzing thread dumps requires deep JVM expertise. In many teams, only a handful of engineers know how to interpret them, which slows down troubleshooting. Manual analysis can also be time‑consuming, taking hours, if not days to sift through, especially with hundreds of threads. Furthermore, this reactive approach only identifies issues after degradation has already occurred, potentially impacting your customers. Generative AI can make proactive, expert-level troubleshooting faster and more straightforward for developers and operations teams. In this blog, we’ll walk through how to build an automated thread dump analysis pipeline that uses Prometheus for monitoring, Grafana for alerting, AWS Lambda for orchestration, and Amazon Bedrock for AI‑powered analysis. The solution works on both Amazon Elastic Container Servics (Amazon ECS ) and Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS ), helping teams go from raw thread dumps to actionable insights within seconds of detecting an issue.