eBPF Profiler

The OpenTelemetry eBPF profiler runs once per host and samples every process on it, not just one instrumented application. It’s the option to reach for when a service isn’t written in one of KloudMate’s supported languages, or when you want whole-system visibility (including native binaries, statically linked Go, and other runtimes the SDKs above can’t reach) without touching application code.

Prerequisites

• A Linux host with a kernel new enough for eBPF (4.19+; 5.x recommended) and privileged access to load BPF programs (CAP_SYS_ADMIN/CAP_BPF, typically run as root or in a privileged container).
• The ingest endpoint: https://otel.kloudmate.com/v1/profiles/pyroscope
• An API key — go to Settings → API Keys, click Add New, and create an Ingest Key – Backend. Copy it immediately; KloudMate shows it only once.

Install and run

The project ships a container image, so the fastest path is running it directly with Docker. It needs --privileged (to attach eBPF programs) and --pid=host (to see every process on the host, not just its own container):

docker run --privileged --pid=host \
  -v /sys/kernel/debug:/sys/kernel/debug:ro \
  otel/opentelemetry-ebpf-profiler:latest \
  -collection-agent=https://otel.kloudmate.dev/v1/profiles/pyroscope \
  -secret-token=YOUR_API_KEY \
  -environment=my-environment

Swap YOUR_API_KEY for the key you copied above, and my-environment for a name that identifies this host or cluster.

To run it on every node of a Kubernetes cluster instead of a single host, deploy it as a DaemonSet — the repo’s deploy directory has Kubernetes manifests to start from.

Note

This project moves fast and its CLI flags have changed across releases. Treat the flags above as a starting point and check the repository’s README for the exact flags your installed version expects.

Verify it’s working

Open Profiling → All Services, select cpu from the profile type dropdown, and give it a minute. The host (or one of the processes running on it) appears as a service with a live chart as soon as the first samples land.

If nothing shows up, confirm the container actually started — a missing --privileged flag or an unreadable /sys/kernel/debug mount fails at eBPF-program load time, before it ever tries to reach KloudMate.

Related

• Supported Languages — per-language SDKs, if you’d rather profile one application than a whole host.
• Flame Graph — where this data ends up once it’s flowing.