Elastic Universal Profiling agent, a continuous profiling solution, is now open source

Elastic Universal Profiling™ agent is now open source! The industry’s most advanced fleetwide continuous profiling solution empowers users to identify performance bottlenecks, reduce cloud spend, and minimize their carbon footprint. This post explores the history of the agent, its move to open source, and its future integration with OpenTelemetry.

At Elastic, open source is more than just a philosophy — it's our DNA. We believe the benefits of whole-system continuous profiling extend far beyond performance optimization. It's a win for businesses and the planet alike. For instance, since launching Elastic Universal Profiling in general availability (GA), we've observed a wide variety of use cases from customers. 

These range from customers relying fully on Universal Profiling's differential flame graphs and topN functions for insights during release management to utilizing AI assistants for quickly optimizing expensive functions. This includes using profiling data to identify the optimal energy-efficient cloud region to run certain workloads. Additionally, customers are using insights that Universal Profiling provides to build evidence to challenge cloud provider bills. As it turns out, cloud providers' in-VM agents can consume a significant portion of the CPU time, which customers are billed for. 

In a move that will empower the community to take advantage of continuous profiling's benefits, we're thrilled to announce that the Elastic Universal Profiling agent, a pioneering eBPF-based continuous profiling agent, is now open source under the Apache 2 license!

This move democratizes hyper-scaler efficiency for everyone, opening exciting new possibilities for the future of continuous profiling, as well as its role in observability and OpenTelemetry.

OpenTelemetry is adopting continuous profiling as a key signal. By open-sourcing the eBPF-based profiling agent and working towards donating it to OTel, Elastic is making it possible to accelerate the standardization of continuous profiling within OpenTelemetry. This move has a massive impact on the observability community, empowering everyone to continuously profile their systems with a standardized protocol. 

This is particularly timely as Moore's Law slows down and cloud computing takes hold, making computational efficiency critical for businesses. 

Here's how whole-system continuous profiling benefits you: 

• Maximize gross margins: By reducing the computational resources needed to run applications, businesses can optimize their cloud spend and improve profitability. Whole-system continuous profiling is one way of identifying the most expensive applications (down to the lines of code) across diverse environments that may span multiple cloud providers. This principle aligns with the familiar adage, "a penny saved is a penny earned." In the cloud context, every CPU cycle saved translates to money saved. 

• Minimize environmental impact: Energy consumption associated with computing is a growing concern (source: MIT Energy Initiative). More efficient code translates to lower energy consumption, contributing to a reduction in carbon footprint. 

• Accelerate engineering workflows: Continuous profiling provides detailed insights to help debug complex issues faster, guide development, and improve overall code quality.

This is where Elastic Universal Profiling comes in — designed to help organizations run efficient services by minimizing computational wastage. To this end, it measures code efficiency in three dimensions: CPU utilization, CO2, and cloud cost.  

Elastic's journey with continuous profiling began by joining forces with optimyze.cloud –– this became the foundation for Elastic Universal Profiling. We are excited to see this product evolve into its next growth phase in the open-source world.

As Elastic Universal Profiling transitions into this new open source era, the potential for transformative impact on performance optimization, cost efficiency, and environmental sustainability is immense. Elastic's approach — balancing innovation with responsibility — paves the way for a future where technology not only powers our world but does so in a way that is sustainable and accessible to all.

Get started with the open source Elastic Universal Profiling agent today! Download it directly from GitHub and follow the instructions in the repository.

The release and timing of any features or functionality described in this post remain at Elastic's sole discretion. Any features or functionality not currently available may not be delivered on time or at all.