The State of OpenTelemetry Profiling- Damien Matthieu, Elastic & Felix Geisendoerfer, Datadog
Talkat Observability Day 2025 · on Tuesday, 2025-04-01· at 16:30· Level 1 | Hall Entrance S10 | Room B·
summary
OpenTelemetry now defines a profiling signal with an eBPF receiver in Collector (donated June 2024) that can export profiles to Elasticsearch, file and other exporters; the protocol deliberately breaks from pprof/PPR compatibility (convertible but not one-to-one). Current builds show flame graphs plus per-thread timeline views and support timestamped profiling events, but stack-frame encoding, timestamp semantics, resource splitting and symbol-upload protocol remain work in progress. Milestones: OTLP profiling draft (Sep 2022), data model EP239 (Feb 2024), Collector support (Oct 2024), eBPF receiver merged Jan 2025.
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chapters (12)
- 0:00Introduction and setup
- 0:46Defining profiling
- 2:37Advanced profiling visuals
- 4:11Use cases for profiling
- 6:16Growth of profiling
- 7:30OpenTelemetry SIG milestones
- 11:05Collector architecture
- 12:26Deployment patterns
- 14:01Current collector status
- 15:38Profiling demonstration
- 17:02Viewing profiling data
- 18:28Future work and conclusions
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