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Debugging

In addition to writing unit and integration tests, debugging your Workflows is also a very valuable testing tool. You can debug your Workflow code using a debugger provided by your favorite Java IDE.

Note that when debugging your Workflow code, the Temporal Java SDK includes deadlock detection which fails a Workflow Task in case the code blocks over a second without relinquishing execution control. Because of this you can often encounter the PotentialDeadlockException Exception while stepping through Workflow code during debugging.

To alleviate this issue, you can set the TEMPORAL_DEBUG environment variable to true before debugging your Workflow code. Make sure to set TEMPORAL_DEBUG to true only during debugging.

How to debug in a development environment

In addition to the normal development tools of logging and a debugger, you can also see what's happening in your Workflow by using the Web UI or Temporal CLI.

How to debug in a production environment

You can debug production Workflows using:

You can debug and tune Worker performance with metrics and the Worker performance guide. For more information, see Observability ▶️ Metrics for setting up SDK metrics.

Debug Server performance with Cloud metrics or self-hosted Server metrics.