The Fourth Pillar Arrives: OpenTelemetry Profiling Alpha in A... Felix Geisendörfer & Florian Lehner

This talk explores the newly released OpenTelemetry profiling signal, now in alpha, with insights from Profiling SIG members Felix Geisendörfer of Datadog and Florian Lehner of Elastic. The speakers provide a recap of their journey to this milestone and demonstrate how to effectively use the OpenTelemetry eBPF profiler to identify and troubleshoot complex bugs, particularly those caused by LLM-driven refactoring. They emphasize that profiling serves not only performance optimizations but is also crucial for quickly identifying the root cause of incidents at the code level. The session concludes with a discussion on the necessary steps for stabilizing profiling as an OpenTelemetry signal and encourages attendees to experiment with its implementation in their own environments.