Run Universal Profiling on self-hosted Elastic stack

To run Universal Profiling on self-hosted Elastic stack, you need an appropriate license.

Here you’ll find information on running Universal Profiling when hosting the Elastic stack on your own infrastructure.

Universal Profiling consists of a client part (the Universal Profiling Agent) and a server part (the backend). This documentation focuses on the server part.

Prerequisites

edit

Elastic stack: minimum version 8.12.0, on any Linux distribution (x86_64 or ARM64 architectures), with a Kernel 4.x or higher.
ECE: minimum version 3.7.0, using the 8.12.0 stackpack or higher.
Kubernetes: version 1.22+, using Helm charts.

For Elastic Cloud on Kubernetes (ECK), the Universal Profiling backend can be installed using helm charts in standalone mode. Once installed, you can connect the profiling backend to an existing ECK-managed stack. Currently, we do not have Profiling Operators and the CRDs necessary for running the Profiling backend natively in ECK.

Supported platforms

edit

The following platforms were tested and successfully ran the Universal Profiling backend.

Platform	OS	Details
Linux x86_64, ARM64	Ubuntu 20.04 LTS	✅ DEB package from the repository ✅ Docker ✅ Binary
Linux x86_64, ARM64	Ubuntu 22.04 LTS	✅ DEB package from the repository ✅ Docker ✅ Binary
Linux x86_64, ARM64	Debian Bullseye	✅ DEB package from the repository ✅ Docker ✅ Binary
Linux x86_64, ARM64	Debian Bookworm	✅ DEB package from the repository ✅ Docker ✅ Binary
Linux x86_64, ARM64	Fedora 37	✅ YUM package from the repository ✅ Docker ✅ Binary
Linux x86_64, ARM64	Fedora 38	✅ YUM package from the repository ✅ Docker ✅ Binary
Linux x86_64, ARM64	RHEL 9.3	✅ YUM package from the repository ✅ Docker ✅ Binary
Linux x86_64, ARM64	RHEL 8.9	✅ YUM package from the repository ✅ Docker ✅ Binary
Linux x86_64, ARM64	openSUSE Leap	✅ Docker ✅ Binary
Linux x86_64, ARM64	SUSE Linux Enterprise 15	✅ Docker ✅ Binary
Kubernetes 1.25, 1.26, 1.27	Linux x86_64/ARM64	✅ Helm charts

Architecture overview

edit

The backend is made up of two services: the collector and the symbolizer.

The collector receives profiling data from the Universal Profiling Agents and sends it to Elasticsearch. It listens on an HTTP server and serves a gRPC endpoint.
The symbolizer processes debug symbols that are not available on the Universal Profiling Agent, and symbolizes native frames from OS packages. It also listens on an HTTP server and serves an endpoint to upload private debug symbols. Refer to Adding symbols for more information on the importance of adding symbols.

profiling self managed ingestion architecture

« Troubleshoot your Universal Profiling agent deployment Install the backend »