Usually I see all these tabs in VisualVM for locally running Java programs:
I just remove ~/.visualvm
and rerun, See https://java.net/jira/browse/VISUALVM-598
Check that proxy is disabled if you are running VisualVM for local application
I had a similar problem with missing profiler tab in VisualVM. I'm using Oracle JDK 1.8 and want to profile web application running on Tomcat 8 (JPA, Spring, Hibernate, Vaadin, etc).
I tried all above-mentioned solutions and many others found on the internet, but unfortunately, none of them solved missing profiler tab issue.
So I switched to Java Mission Control profiling tool (JMC + Flight Recorder) which is a part of standard Oracle JDK (from JDK 1.7 update 40) and it works great.
In my case, the issue was the usage of wrong JDK version. My App was running on jdk1.7.0_80, VisualVm running with jdk1.8.0_162. Replacing the APP JDK version from 1.7.0_79 to 1.7.0_80 fixes the problem.
You might need to enable jmx ports on your app. Try adding these switches to your VM and see if the tabs appear again:
-Dcom.sun.management.jmxremote.port=6789 -Dcom.sun.management.jmxremote.ssl=false -Dcom.sun.management.jmxremote.authenticate=false
I found that this was the issue of usage of wrong JDK version. In my case my application was running on 64bit JDK and I started VisualVM from 32bit JDK. After starting VisualVM from the same JDK on which my application is running, everything was fine. Hope it will help you.