open-telemetry/opentelemetry-ebpf-profiler

Health v2 · maintenance only

Flags: no_releases

Adoption not part of the score

3176 stars · 429 forks observed · 2026-08-28

What it is AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, 2026-08-29, confidence not recorded

A whole-system, cross-language continuous profiler for Linux built on eBPF, part of the OpenTelemetry project. It profiles all processes on a host non-intrusively with very low overhead, producing mixed kernel-to-userspace stacktraces across many runtimes and emitting the OpenTelemetry Profiles signal.

Use cases

• profile all processes on a production Linux server with low overhead
• get continuous CPU profiles without instrumenting or restarting applications
• capture mixed stacktraces across kernel, native code, and managed runtimes like JVM, Python, and Node.js
• profile native C/C++ or Rust binaries without debug symbols or frame pointers
• export profiling data in OpenTelemetry Profiles format
• find CPU hotspots in a datacenter fleet without deploying per-process agents

When to choose

• you need whole-host continuous profiling on Linux with minimal overhead
• your fleet mixes multiple languages and runtimes and you want unified stacktraces
• you cannot modify, instrument, or restart the processes being profiled
• you want profiles in the OpenTelemetry Profiles signal format

When to avoid

• you need profiling on non-Linux platforms like macOS or Windows
• your Linux kernel is older than the minimum supported version (roughly 5.10+)
• you need memory or GPU profiling rather than CPU/on-CPU profiling
• you want a GUI-based interactive profiler rather than an agent

Facets

application · maturity active

monitoring tracing developer-tools monitoring performance operating-systems go self-hosted ebpf profiler continuous-profiling opentelemetry whole-system-profiling cross-language low-overhead linux

Member repositories

For agents

markdown · JSON · MCP: product_card(name="open-telemetry/opentelemetry-ebpf-profiler")