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Exporting Profiles to a Destination

The Odigos UI gives you fast, in-memory access to profiles for enabled Sources — ideal for live investigation when you don’t need historical data but just want to inspect certain workloads on demand. For long-term retention, time-range analysis, and cross-service comparison, you can route profile data to an external backend the same way you route traces, metrics or logs, by configuring a Destination in Odigos. When a profile-capable Destination is configured, the gateway starts exporting OTLP Profiles to that backend alongside the Odigos UI.

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Supported Format

Profile data is emitted as OTLP Profiles — the OpenTelemetry profiles signal. Any backend that can ingest OTLP Profiles over HTTP can, in principle, receive data from Odigos.
OTLP Profiles is still experimental — the wire format and ingestion path (/v1development/profiles) may change. Keep your backend on a recent version that speaks a compatible protocol revision.

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Prerequisites

Before exporting profiles to a Destination:
  1. Profiling is enabled cluster-wide (profiling.enabled=true Helm value). See Getting Started.
  2. The workload you want to profile is registered as a Source.
  3. The Destination CRD is configured with the PROFILES signal.
  4. Your chosen backend is reachable from the Odigos gateway and accepts OTLP Profiles.
The Destination can be created through the Odigos UI, CLI, or Kubernetes CRD. Profile export starts once profiling is enabled and the Destination includes the PROFILES signal.

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Try out configuring a profiling Destinations

Pyroscope

Self-hosted Grafana Pyroscope. Receives OTLP profiles over HTTP at /v1development/profiles.

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Example: Pyroscope

Screen recording: add Pyroscope destination with Profiles, then view exported profiles in Pyroscope
1

Enable profiling on the cluster

Follow Getting started and set profiling.enabled=true so profiling is active on the cluster.
2

Add a Pyroscope destination with Profiles

In Destinations, add Pyroscope and enable the Profiles signal so the gateway forwards OTLP Profiles to Pyroscope as well as to the UI.
Odigos Destinations list showing a Pyroscope destination with Profiles enabled
3

Configure the Pyroscope endpoint

Set Pyroscope URL to the distributor HTTP API as host:port (for example pyroscope.pyroscope:4040). Do not add an /otlp prefix—Odigos sends OTLP Profiles to the path Pyroscope expects on that host.
Destination detail showing Pyroscope URL and Profiles signal
4

Confirm profiles in Pyroscope

After the gateway picks up the destination, open Pyroscope and confirm profile data for your services. Export does not depend on having a profiling slot open in the Odigos UI.
Pyroscope explorer showing ingested profile data from Odigos

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Topology

The export path mirrors the rest of the Odigos pipeline:

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Getting Help

If you have any issues, or require our assistance, please open an issue in GitHub, or reach out to us in Odigos Slack