Profiling Is the Fourth Signal—So Why Aren’t You Using It Yet?

What if I told you there's a way to spot memory leaks, CPU bottlenecks & performance regressions—before your users feel them?

And if I told you it works across every runtime, in production, with zero instrumentation & near-zero overhead?

And if I told you almost no one is doing it?

Profiling has finally joined metrics, logs & traces as the 4th core signal in OTel. But while the spec is ready, most stacks—and teams—aren’t. Enter eBPF: the missing piece that makes continuous, runtime-agnostic profiling not just possible, but practical.

This talk will dig into how eBPF-based profilers work, capturing kernel & user-space events, sampling stack traces & delivering high-fidelity insights without touching your code. We’ll show how this data flows through OTEL pipelines & how tools like OTel’s OSS profiler are bringing this vision to life.

If you’ve been procrastinating on profiling because it seemed too hard, risky, or niche, no more–you’ll leave with a concrete path to adopt eBPF profiling today.