Profiling a Golang/C/C++/Rust service on Linux

This documentation helps you set up the configuration to find which processes want to be monitored and profiled.

Startup service

Startup your service in Linux, and make sure your service already has the symbol data inside the binary file. So we could locate the stack symbol, It could be checked following these ways:

1. objdump: Using objdump --syms path/to/service.
2. readelf: Using readelf --syms path/to/service.

Starting Rover

Enable Linux Process Scanner

After your service has been started, then configure the Linux process scanner to let Rover know how to find the service. Please make sure the Linux Process Detector has been active.

Then configure the finder to locate/identity service. It contains these data configure:

1. Regex to locate the service by command line.
2. Update the process entity builder.

Locate Service

You could use the ps -ef and grep to filter the which process you want to profile. In this case, my service is sqrt.

$ ps -ef|grep sqrt
root      2072    1790  0 14:59 pts/0    00:00:00 ./sqrt name=a

Following the command example above, you could see the last column showing the process command line is ./sqrt name=a. We use the regex to filter the process, In this case, we could use sqrt as the service identity.

Update Process Entity

For the demo, we update the entity data as:

1. layer: As the OS_LINUX.
2. service: As the sqrt.
3. instance: As local IPv4 address by network interface en0.
4. process: As the executable file name: sqrt.
5. labels*: As empty.

You could be following this configuration to get more configuration information.

Enable Profiling

Make sure the profiling module has been active.

You could be following this configuration to get more configuration information.

Full Configuration

Please follow the comment to update the backend address to your SkyWalking OAP address.

core:
  backend:
    addr: localhost:11800 # please change the backend address to your SkyWalking OAP address
    enable_TLS: false
    client_pem_path: "client.pem"
    client_key_path: "client.key"
    insecure_skip_verify: false
    ca_pem_path: "ca.pem"
    check_period: 5
    authentication: ""
    
process_discovery:
  heartbeat_period: 20s
  scanner:
    period: 3s
    mode: REGEX
    regex:
      - match_cmd: sqrt
        layer: OS_LINUX
        service_name: sqrt
        instance_name: {{.Rover.HostIPV4 "en0"}}
        process_name: {{.Process.ExeName}}
        labels: ""

profiling:
  active: true
  check_interval: 10s
  flush_interval: 5s
  task:
    on_cpu:
      dump_period: 9ms