instrumenting.md

Instrument Your Application

The way Conprof works, is by collecting profiles in pprof format from HTTP endpoints. So all applications have to do is use one of the client libraries for pprof and expose an HTTP endpoint serving it. Pprof client libraries exist for various languages:

Language/runtime	CPU	Heap	Allocations	Blocking	Mutex Contention	Extra
Go	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Goroutine, fgprof
Rust	Yes	No	No	No	No
Python	Yes	Yes	No	No	No
NodeJS	Yes	Yes	No	No	No
JVM	Yes	No	No	No	No

Guides

• Go: Instrument your Go app with pprof

Generic Profiling

Additionally any perf profile can be converted to pprof using perf_data_converter, so even programs that do not have native support for pprof can benefit from continuous profiling with Conprof. We do, however, recommend to use native instrumentation when possible, as it allows language and runtime specific nuances to be encodede in the respective libraries.

Once there is an HTTP endpoint that serves profiles in pprof format, all that needs to be done is configure Conprof to collect the profile in a regular interval. See examples/conprof.yaml for an example configuration.