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Pprof Receiver

Status Available in: contrib Maintainers: @MovieStoreGuy, @atoulme Source: opentelemetry-collector-contrib

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Overview

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Configuration

The receiver supports four independent ingestion modes that can be combined in a single receiver instance. At least one section must be configured.
  • remote: poll pprof from a remote HTTP endpoint
  • file: read pprof files matching a glob pattern
  • self: profile the running collector
  • server: accept pushed pprof data over HTTP at POST /v1/pprof
Each scraping section (remote, file, self) accepts its own collection_interval (default 10s) and initial_delay (default 1s).

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remote

Accepts every field of confighttp.ClientConfig.
  • endpoint (required): the URL to fetch pprof data from.

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file

  • include (required): glob pattern for pprof files to read.

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self

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server

Accepts every field of confighttp.ServerConfig. The server exposes a single endpoint: 
POST /v1/pprof
Content-Type: application/octet-stream
The body is a serialized pprof profile.proto. Standard Content-Encoding values (e.g. gzip) are handled transparently by confighttp.

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Pushing an existing pprof file

A profile.proto is already gzip-encoded on disk by the standard runtime/pprof package, so the file bytes can be sent as-is with Content-Encoding: gzip: 
package main

import (
	"log"
	"net/http"
	"os"
)

func main() {
	f, err := os.Open("cpu.pprof")
	if err != nil {
		log.Fatal(err)
	}
	defer f.Close()

	req, err := http.NewRequest(http.MethodPost, "http://localhost:4040/v1/pprof", f)
	if err != nil {
		log.Fatal(err)
	}
	req.Header.Set("Content-Type", "application/octet-stream")
	req.Header.Set("Content-Encoding", "gzip")

	resp, err := http.DefaultClient.Do(req)
	if err != nil {
		log.Fatal(err)
	}
	defer resp.Body.Close()

	if resp.StatusCode != http.StatusNoContent {
		log.Fatalf("unexpected status: %s", resp.Status)
	}
}

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Example

receivers:
  pprof:
    remote:
      endpoint: http://my-svc:9090/debug/pprof/profile?seconds=1
      collection_interval: 30s
      initial_delay: 10s
    server:
      endpoint: 0.0.0.0:4040
      tls:
        cert_file: server.crt
        key_file: server.key
    file:
      include: /tmp/pprof/*
      collection_interval: 10s
      initial_delay: 20s
    self:
      collection_interval: 15s
      initial_delay: 1s
Last generated: 2026-06-01