Java (and UNIX) has for a long time lacked the equivalent (for the most part) of Windows perfmon. While perfmon was by no means perfect the goals were admirable. Developers could export simple statistics from their application and perfmon could introspect the values and graph them.

With commons benchmark we provide similar functionality by allowing developers to export statistics and then tool developers can write frontends to monitor application performance.

This code started off in the Apache Commons as a package named 'Benchmark' and has moved here to stabilize in a more flexible and open environment.