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Overview

Parca Agent is an always-on sampling profiler that uses eBPF to capture raw profiling data with very low overhead. It observes user-space, and kernel-space stack traces 100 times per second and builds pprof formatted profiles from the extracted data. For in-depth detail and explanation refer to the the Parca Agent Design documentation.

The collected data can be viewed locally via HTTP endpoints and optionally be configured to be sent to a Parca server, where it can be queried and analyzed over time.

Requirements

  • Linux Kernel version 4.18+
  • For Kubernetes metadata, a CRI that supports CRI v1 (for example containerd v1.6.x+)

Supported Profiles

Profiles available for compiled languages (e.g. C, C++, Go, Rust):

  • CPU
  • Soon: network usage, memory allocations

Runtime-specific information, such as Goroutines, requires manual instrumentation.

Tutorials

You can find a tutorial for each of the target discovery mechanisms below (each of these also contain a Parca server setup):

Troubleshooting

See Troubleshooting Parca Agent.