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Documentation Index

Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://docs.odigos.io/llms.txt

Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.

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Prerequisites

  • Odigos v1.25.0 or newer installed on the cluster
  • The workload you want to profile must already be a Source

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Step 1: Enable Profiling

Profiling is an opt-in feature controlled by a single Helm value. Set profiling.enabled=true when installing or upgrading Odigos: 
helm upgrade --install odigos odigos/odigos \
  --namespace odigos-system \
  --create-namespace \
  --set profiling.enabled=true
When this flag is set Odigos provisions the following automatically:
  • The eBPF profiler receiver is activated on every Data Collector
  • A profiles pipeline gets enabled in Odigos components and as soon as profile samples start to arrive, Odigos UI buffers start generating the flame graph
  • You can also export profiling data to any third-party Destination that supports viewing profiling data
Profiling does not replace or interfere with your existing traces, metrics, or logs pipelines. It runs as a separate pipeline inside the same collector processes.

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Step 2: View Profiles in the Odigos UI

Once profiling is enabled on the cluster, you can inspect profiles for any Source directly from the Odigos UI.
Demo of continuous CPU profiling workflow in Odigos — enabling a slot, viewing the flame graph, and inspecting symbols
1

Open the Profiling tab

Navigate to Sources in the Odigos UI and click on the workload you want to investigate. This opens the source drawer. Inside the source drawer, click the Profiling tab. Click Enable Profiling to open a slot for this workload. Odigos will start buffering profile data as it arrives from the node.
Source drawer showing the Profiling tab with flame graph and symbol table
2

Inspect the flame graph

Send traffic to your service or wait for background activity. The eBPF profiler samples continuously at the kernel level, higher CPU activity means more profiles getting collected for that workload. The flame graph updates as profile data accumulates in the buffer. Wider bars represent more CPU time. Click any frame to zoom in.
3

Inspect the symbols table

The symbols table lists every function captured in the profile with its Self time (CPU spent exclusively in that function) and Total time (including all callees). Use it alongside the flame graph to quickly rank the top CPU consumers without navigating the call tree visually.
Closing the Profiling tab does not immediately destroy the slot. The slot and its buffered data persist until the TTL expires or the UI pod restarts. This is intentional, it lets you reopen the tab and see the same data during an ongoing investigation.

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Advanced: Buffer Tuning

The in-memory profile store is sized from environment variables read by the UI pod at startup.
Environment variableDefaultDescription
PROFILES_MAX_SLOTS24Maximum number of concurrently active profiling slots (one per workload). When the limit is reached the oldest slot is evicted (LRU).
PROFILES_SLOT_TTL_SECONDS120Seconds of inactivity after which a slot is swept by the background cleanup loop.
PROFILES_SLOT_MAX_BYTES8388608 (8 MiB)Maximum bytes of raw OTLP profile chunks retained per slot. Older chunks are dropped when this cap is reached.
PROFILES_CLEANUP_INTERVAL_SECONDS15How often the background TTL sweep runs inside the UI process.

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OTLP Exporter Tuning

If you need to adjust retry behaviour or compression on the profiling OTLP pipelines (node → gateway, gateway → UI), use the profiling.exporter.* values: 
profiling:
  enabled: true
  exporter:
    enableDataCompression: false
    timeout: 5s
    retryOnFailure:
      enabled: true
      initialInterval: 5s
      maxInterval: 30s
      maxElapsedTime: 300s

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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