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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.

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.

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:

All of the above have been substantially improved in the Alpha release, so let’s dive into what we’ve been working on!

Creating 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: