Basics of heap dump analysis

So my JVM just crashed and told me about some file named 'java_pid12345.hprof', what the heck do I do with this? We will be talking about a couple tools used to identify potential memory leaks within heap dumps and concurrency issues within thread dumps with less guesswork when your production machines get sick all of a sudden. Tools/software that will be used: Oracle JDK 1.6+ Eclipse Memory Analysis Tool (MAT) 1.3.1 (Standalone version) Thread Dump Analyzer (TDA) version 2.2 (Standalone Version)