Profiling Instrumentation for OpenTelemetry Go SDK

The package provides means to integrate tracing with profiling. More specifically, a TracerProvider implementation that annotates profiling data with trace_id and span_id pprof tags, making it possible to filter the profile of a particular trace or span in Pyroscope.

Note that the module does not control pprof profiler itself – it still needs to be started for profiles to be collected. This can be done either via runtime/pprof package, or using the Pyroscope client.

By default:

• The trace_id label is added on the local root span and inherited by every descendant span through pprof's context label propagation.
• The span_id label and pyroscope.profile.id span attribute are set on the local root span only (the first span created locally) — this is the join key Grafana's "Traces to profiles" UI uses today. Presence of the attribute does not necessarily indicate that the span has a profile: stack trace samples might not be collected if the utilized CPU time is less than the sample interval (10ms).

Limitations:

• Only CPU profiling is fully supported at the moment.

Options

• WithSpanIDLabelScope(Scope) — control whether the span_id label is emitted: ScopeNone (off), ScopeRootSpan (default — local root only, descendants inherit the root's value), or ScopeAllSpans (every span emits its own). ScopeAllSpans significantly increases label cardinality.
• WithSpanNameLabelScope(Scope) — same, for the span_name label.

Trace spans profiles

To start profiling trace spans, you need to include our go module in your app:

go get github.com/grafana/otel-profiling-go

Then add the pyroscope tracer provider:

package main

import (
	otelpyroscope "github.com/grafana/otel-profiling-go"
	"github.com/grafana/pyroscope-go"
)

func main() {
	// Initialize your tracer provider as usual.
	tp := initTracer()

	// Wrap it with otelpyroscope tracer provider.
	otel.SetTracerProvider(otelpyroscope.NewTracerProvider(tp))

	// If you're using Pyroscope Go SDK, initialize pyroscope profiler.
	_, _ = pyroscope.Start(pyroscope.Config{
		ApplicationName: "my-service",
		ServerAddress:   "http://localhost:4040",
	})

	// Your code goes here.
}

Tracing integration is supported in pull mode as well: if you scrape profiles using Grafana Agent, you should make sure that the pyroscope service_name label matches service.name attribute specified in the OTel SDK configuration. Please refer to the Grafana Agent documentation to learn more.

Example

You can find a complete example setup with Grafana Tempo in the Pyroscope repository.