OpenTelemetry Profiles Enters Public Alpha

Summary

OpenTelemetry Profiles Enters Public AlphaSince OpenTelemetry first introduced Profiles, momentum has only grown towards building a unified industry standard for continuous production profiling, standing alongside traces, metrics, and logs. Today, the Profiling SIG is proud to announce that the Profiles signal has officially entered public Alpha, and we are ready for broader community use and feedback.Production profiling for allContinuously capturing low-overhead performance profiles in production is a technique that has been used for decades. It helps troubleshoot production incidents, improves user experience by making software faster and reduces computation costs by making the same work take less resources. Historically, the industry lacked a common framework and protocol for continuous profiling, even with formats like JFR and pprof being popular.With OpenTelemetry Profiles, we’re introducing an industry-wide standard for production profiling, with true vendor neutrality and powered by community and ecosystem support. There are a few components to making this a reality:Creating a unified data representation for profiling data, compatible with existing formats like pprof.Introducing a novel reference eBPF-based profiler implementation.Making Profiles an organic part of the OpenTelemetry ecosystem, such as integrating it with the OTel Collector.All of the above have been substantially improved in the Alpha release, so let’s dive into what we’ve been working on!Standardizing the data representationCreating a unified profiling format is a significant challenge, as it must serve as the industry standard across diverse environments. The working group had to reconcile numerous requirements: sampling vs. tracing, native vs. interpreted runtimes, the tension between wire/memory-size efficiency and data readability, and other similar aspects.The resulting Profiles Alpha format offers a balanced feature set that can efficiently capture profiling data:The stack representat...