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A kubectl plugin that allows you to profile production applications with low-overhead by generatingFlameGraphs

Runningkubectlf-flame doesnot require any modification to existing pods.

• Requirements
• Usage
• Installing
• How it works
• Contribute
• Maintainers
• License

• Supported languages: Go, Java (any JVM based language), Python, Ruby, and NodeJS
• Kubernetes cluster that use Docker as the container runtime (tested on GKE, EKS and AKS)

In order to profile a Java application in podmypod for 1 minute and save the flamegraph as/tmp/flamegraph.svg run:

kubectl flame mypod -t 1m --lang java -f /tmp/flamegraph.svg

Profiling Java application in alpine based containers require using--alpine flag:

kubectl flame mypod -t 1m -f /tmp/flamegraph.svg --lang java --alpine

NOTICE: this is only required for Java apps, the--alpine flag is unnecessary for Go profiling.

Pods that contains more than one container require specifying the target container as an argument:

kubectl flame mypod -t 1m --lang go -f /tmp/flamegraph.svg mycontainer

Profiling Go application in pods that contains more than one process require specifying the target process name via--pgrep flag:

kubectl flame mypod -t 1m --lang go -f /tmp/flamegraph.svg --pgrep go-app

Java profiling assumes that the process name isjava. Use--pgrep flag if your process name is different.

To run this tool on Kubernetes clusters that use containerd as the runtime engine, you must specify the path to the containerd runtime files:

kubectl flame mypod -t 1m --docker-path /run/containerd

You can installkubectl flame using theKrew, the package manager for kubectl plugins.

Once you haveKrew installed just run:

kubectl krew install flame

See the release page for the full list of pre-built assets.

kubectl-flame launch a Kubernetes Job on the same node as the target pod.Under the hoodkubectl-flame useasync-profiler in order to generate flame graphs for Java applications.Interaction with the target JVM is done via a shared/tmp folder.Golang support is based onebpf profiling.Python support is based onpy-spy.Ruby support is based onrbspy.NodeJS support is based onperf. In order for Javascript Symbols to be resolved, node process needs to be run with--perf-basic-prof flag.

Please refer tothe contributing.md file for information about how to get involved. We welcome issues, questions, and pull requests.

• Eden Federman:efederman@verizonmedia.com

This project is licensed under the terms of theApache 2.0 open source license. Please refer toLICENSE for the full terms.