In supporting OpenNMS, we often find ourselves needing thread dumps, but getting one can be a pain as we have to explain to the user how to find the right version of jstack (must be the one accompanying the OpenNMS JDK), how to determine the PID, and so on. Why not put all this logic into a script?

I've written one that does all this footwork for us, writes the thread dumps into time-stamped files, and automagically cleans up thread dump files older than a configurable age (default: 2 hours). It's suitable for running from a cron job and can be combined with a test for the existence of a trigger file to make it easy to turn dumps on and off.