March 26, 2026
Profiling beef, served hot
OpenTelemetry Profiles Enters Public Alpha
OpenTelemetry’s new profiler goes Alpha—fans cheer, skeptics side-eye “overhead”
TLDR: OpenTelemetry launched a public Alpha for a shared standard to profile running apps, plus a Linux agent that promises low overhead. The crowd is split: fans report wins, while skeptics doubt the claim and ask why not stick with mature tools like Grafana Pyroscope.
OpenTelemetry just dropped a public Alpha of its new “Profiles” feature—think a common, plug‑and‑play way to see where your app spends time, aimed to sit next to logs, metrics, and traces. They’re promising low‑overhead profiling, Linux magic via an eBPF agent (a lightweight system tool), and the holy grail: vendor‑neutral data that plays nice with popular formats. Sounds tidy, right? The comments promptly turned into a watch party with popcorn.
The loudest reaction: doubt. One skeptic fired off that anything the OpenTelemetry crowd makes can’t possibly be “low‑overhead,” and others asked the real question—how does this stack up against mature tools like Grafana Pyroscope? Meanwhile, fans showed up with receipts: one engineer said they’ve used an Elixir version at work and found it “exceptionally useful.” The vibe became a split‑screen: true believers hyped about a shared standard and no vendor lock‑in, and side‑eyers worried it’s just more observability bloat pasted onto production. Jokes flew about “alpha in prod” and playing Observability Bingo (traces, logs, metrics… now profiles). Whether this becomes the one profiler to rule them all—or just another dashboard tab—remains the spicy question.
Key Points
- •OpenTelemetry’s Profiles signal entered public Alpha, aiming to standardize continuous production profiling alongside traces, metrics, and logs.
- •The Alpha introduces a unified OTLP Profiles data format with deduplicated stacks, dictionary normalization, aggregated and timestamped event support, and semantic conventions.
- •Profiles data can link to associated logs, metrics, and traces via resource attributes and string dictionaries, achieving about 40% smaller wire size and enabling trace/span correlation.
- •OTLP Profiles offers lossless round-trip conversion with pprof; a native translator and a conformance checker are provided for interoperability and standards compliance.
- •An eBPF-based profiling agent, donated by Elastic and integrated with the OpenTelemetry Collector, enables low-overhead whole-system profiling on Linux without extra instrumentation.