SonarQube is an open source platform for continuously monitoring code quality. It detects bugs, vulnerabilities, and code smells based on configured quality rules and profiles. Projects can define quality gates that check thresholds for metrics like issues, coverage, and duplications to flag the quality status as passed, warning, or failed. SonarQube allows comparing metrics across versions to track quality over time and supports code processes like nightly and pull request analysis. A community provides support through rule and profile updates, new plugins, and biweekly meetings to discuss quality concerns.