Support for JFR usage was introduced in IntelliJ IDEA Ultimate 2019.2. So, please check for the inclusion of JFR in the JDK binary you are using. Moving forward, vendors are working on including JFR in the various versions of their JDK binaries. Work is in progress on merging JFR into OpenJDK8 tree. JFR works on Oracle JDK builds starting from version 8 (with its commercial features enabled). Starting with Java 11, JFR is included on all JDK distributions.

To use JFR, you’ll need to Configure your IntelliJ IDEA Ultimate to use a JDK distribution which includes JFR. These profilers can also be configured using settings (Preferences → Build, Execution, Deployment → Java Profiler): IntelliJ IDEA Ultimate includes out of the box support for the Async and JFR profilers. IntelliJ IDEA Ultimate has been supporting Profiler integration since its version 2018.3, with the Async Profiler. On macOS and Linux, the IDE also has integration with Async Profiler. It integrates Java Flight Recorder (JFR) on Windows, macOS, and Linux. IntelliJ IDEA Ultimate integrates multiple profilers. Profiler integrations in IntelliJ IDEA Ultimate

In this blog post, I’ll walk you through the support that IntelliJ IDEA Ultimate has for profiling your applications. Using these metrics, you can determine ways to improve the performance of your system. By profiling your application, you can discover the methods that execute in your application and for how long. Now you can profile your application and analyze the results, without leaving your IDE. IntelliJ IDEA Ultimate has out of the box support for profiling your applications using multiple Profilers.

Intellij idea ultimate toolbox