OpenTelemetry Profiling with Elastic OTel Profiling Agent

OpenTelemetry Profiling Overview

OpenTelemetry profiling is a feature within the broader OpenTelemetry observability framework that focuses on capturing performance data about application runtime and system behavior. Profiling in this context is generally used to identify resource usage and performance bottlenecks within an application. It provides detailed insights into how code executes, which can be crucial for optimizing performance and understanding complex issues in production environments.

What Profiling Measures

• CPU Usage: Understanding which parts of your application are consuming the most CPU time.
• Memory Allocation: Tracking memory usage and identifying memory leaks or areas of inefficient memory use.
• Thread Activity: Analyzing thread usage and synchronization issues, which can help in identifying concurrency problems or deadlocks.

Integration with Telemetry Data

Profiling data can be integrated with other types of telemetry (traces, metrics, logs) provided by OpenTelemetry. This integration allows developers to correlate high resource usage or performance bottlenecks with specific traces or log entries, providing a comprehensive view of application behavior.

Some integration examples as follows:

• Metrics to profiles: You will be able to go from…