Since 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 all Continuously 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.

OpenTelemetry's platform is an observability framework, offering insights into distributed tracing, metrics collection, and log management for cloud-native applications. Through documentation, tutorials, and community contributions, OpenTelemetry provides insights into instrumenting applications to monitor performance and troubleshoot issues. Developers and DevOps teams can learn about distributed tracing standards, telemetry data formats, and integration with observability tools to gain visibility into complex distributed systems.

OpenTelemetry

OpenTelemetry's Profiling SIG has announced the public Alpha release of the Profiles signal, establishing a vendor-neutral industry standard for continuous production profiling alongside traces, metrics, and logs. Key highlights include a unified OTLP Profiles data format (compatible with pprof, 40% smaller wire size via string dictionaries), an eBPF-based profiling agent (donated by Elastic) now shipping as an official OTel Collector distribution with support for Go, Node.js ARM64, .NET 9/10, BEAM (Erlang/Elixir), and Ruby. The Collector gains pprof receiver, Kubernetes metadata enrichment, and OTTL transformation support for profiles. Cross-signal correlation with traces via trace_id/span_id is supported. A conformance checker tool and pprof translator are also released. The signal is not yet recommended for critical production workloads, and backends supporting OTLP Profiles are still emerging.

OpenTelemetry Profiling Enters Public Alpha

Frictionless insights with the eBPF Profiling Agent