In the java realm you have very fine-grained GC logging that provides insight into the overall behavior of the GC and its different subcomponents. Then there are recording/debugging facilities that allow you to trace allocations, how long objects live, analyze the entire heap (including unreachable but not yet collected objects). And higher-level monitoring APIs separate from the logging and debugging stuff. You can also choose between collectors with different characteristics, trading between overall heap size, latency, utilization of CPU cores and other factors.