Elastic, the Search AI Company, announced the donation of its Universal Profiling agent has been accepted into OpenTelemetry (OTel)’s continuous profiling project. This marks a significant milestone in establishing profiling as the fourth telemetry signal in OpenTelemetry.

Elastic Universal Profiling is a whole-system, always-on, continuous profiling solution that eliminates the need for code instrumentation, recompilation, on-host debug symbols or service restarts. Leveraging eBPF, Elastic’s Universal Profiling agent profiles every line of code running on a machine, including application code, kernel, and third-party libraries. The solution measures code efficiency in three dimensions, CPU utilisation, CO2, and cloud cost to help organisations manage efficient services by minimising computational waste.

Unlike traditional profiling, which is often done only in a specific development phase or under controlled test conditions, continuous profiling runs in the background with minimal overhead. This provides real-time, actionable insights without replicating issues in separate environments. SREs, DevOps, and developers now have visibility into how code affects performance and cost, making code and infrastructure improvements easier.

“Our relationship with OTel continues to flourish, particularly in the last year where our donation of Elastic Common Schema, along with deep collaboration and mindshare with the OTel teams, have laid the foundation for successful, stable profiling,” said Abhishek Singh, general manager, observability, at Elastic. “The integration of Elastic Universal Profiling agent is another step forward in this journey and one that will help the global OTel community gain unprecedented visibility into fragmented, rapidly evolving application environments.”

Elastic’s Universal Profiling agent supports various runtimes and languages, such as C/C++, Rust, Zig, Go, Java, Python, Ruby, PHP, Node.js, V8, Perl, and .NET.

As part of the donation, Elastic will also provide a dedicated team of profiling domain experts to co-maintain and advance profiling capabilities within OTel. You can read the Elastic blog for more information on the donation and Elastic’s support of OTel.