Uploaded May 2026 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago
OpenTelemetry has traditionally focused on system boundaries \- request/response cycles, RPC calls, database queries, and service-to-service interactions. But a significant portion of latency often lives *inside* those boundaries: CPU-heavy functions, inefficient serialization, or just code paths doing some real complex work.
Metrics and traces don’t capture this well. From their perspective, it’s just unexplained time within a span and extra latency within the duration metric.
Profiling fills that gap.
It provides continuous, code-level visibility into where time is actually spent \- typically visualized as flame graphs \- and helps attribute latency to specific functions and execution paths.
In this episode, we explore profiling as the fourth signal in OpenTelemetry with Christian Simon, who works on the Grafana Pyroscope.
We’ll cover:
* What profiling adds beyond metrics, logs, and traces
* The current state of profiling in OpenTelemetry
* How to run profiling in production environments
* Correlating profiles with traces and metrics to attribute latency to code paths
Join the conversation, bring your questions, and if it sparks something for you, jump in and help us build and improve OpenTelemetry together.
OpenTelemetry has traditionally focused on system boundaries \- request/response cycles, RPC calls, database queries, and service-to-service interactions. But a significant portion of latency often lives *inside* those boundaries: CPU-heavy functions, inefficient serialization, or just code paths doing some real complex work.
Metrics and traces don’t capture this well. From their perspective, it’s just unexplained time within a span and extra latency within the duration metric.
Profiling fills that gap.
It provides continuous, code-level visibility into where time is actually spent \- typically visualized as flame graphs \- and helps attribute latency to specific functions and execution paths.
In this episode, we explore profiling as the fourth signal in OpenTelemetry with Christian Simon, who works on the Grafana Pyroscope.
We’ll cover:
* What profiling adds beyond metrics, logs, and traces
* The current state of profiling in OpenTelemetry
* How to run profiling in production environments
* Correlating profiles with traces and metrics to attribute latency to code paths
Join the conversation, bring your questions, and if it sparks something for you, jump in and help us build and improve OpenTelemetry together.
