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Polar Signals Cloud: Always-on, zero-instrumentation continuous profiling

polarsignals.com

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Re: Polar Signals Cloud: Always-on, zero-instrumentation continuous profiling

#21

Post by madhusudancs »

I rarely come out and post on HN, but I couldn't resist.

First off, congratulations on the launch!

I am doing some work around Python tracing using eBPF tools and spending a lot time reading about CPython interpreter and runtime implementation. I came across this Polar Signals blog post[0] last week. Fantastic, fantastic work! I learned a ton about Python internals in just a few minutes that I had completely missed even after reading the code for days. This post also set a benchmark for technical writing for me.

Huge kudos for all the great work! And thank you for sharing all these out!

[0] https://www.polarsignals.com/blog/posts/2023/10/04/profiling...

Re: Polar Signals Cloud: Always-on, zero-instrumentation continuous profiling

#23

Post by brancz »

charesjrdan wrote: post #22

Is there any support for profiling js applications? I see node.js but seems like browser js isn’t supported?

Great question! That’s correct, for the moment we’re focusing on everything that happens in the backend. That said, the system will accept anything in the pprof format so I’d love to see something like “1% of users get profiled and data sent” from the frontend, that’d be awesome!

We’ll think about building something like this but if there is someone with a use case I’d love to chat and figure out how we can make it work together!

Re: Polar Signals Cloud: Always-on, zero-instrumentation continuous profiling

#25

Post by brancz »

ccvannorman wrote: post #24

Prerequisites: Kubernetes Cluster. Kubernetes Nodes are running Linux 5.4 or newer. Dang.. but it does look like a tool I would want if I used K8s!

Oh we’ll make this more clear, actually only Linux 5.4 is required, Kubernetes is only to add more metadata. It still works just fine and we have customers running it outside of Kubernetes provisioned by ansible.

Re: Polar Signals Cloud: Always-on, zero-instrumentation continuous profiling

#26

Post by brancz »

eep_social wrote: post #20
brancz wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Great question! At the moment it is 30 days. We've had a few requests to make that configurable, but the reality is that the most costly part is to lay it out in an optimized way in the first place which happens very early on in the ingestion path, and from there on it's only object storage cost, so if there is customer demand we can increase this.

Any plans on the roadmap for aggregation (compression) and long term retention or would you instead ship data back out to a separate tool? I’ve enjoyed having 3-5 years of prom metrics retention to look at seasonal traffic trends but we spent a fair bit of CPU aggregating raw metrics down to the right granularity for that kind of long term retention. My feeling is that the observability world is moving towards small,…

Yeah that’s basically how this system is built as well. We buffer a certain amount of data in the ingestion nodes and then offload it to object storage. In object storage it’s actually laid out in the parquet format so we could allow users to export/download this. Or like I said, the object storage cost is really the smallest piece in the system we might even just decide not to have any retention at all.

Re: Polar Signals Cloud: Always-on, zero-instrumentation continuous profiling

#27

Post by dredmorbius »

brancz wrote: post #11
dang wrote: post #10

It's pretty hard to tell from the website what this product does, and the submitted title ("Polar Signals Cloud Is Generally Available") doesn't explain anything, so I replaced it with a phrase from https://www.polarsignals.com/blog/posts/2023/10/10/polarsign... that seems to say something.

Thank you! We'll work on the messaging on the website!

One of my most popular HN comments ever has some suggestions:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7491381>

Re: Polar Signals Cloud: Always-on, zero-instrumentation continuous profiling

#28

Post by brancz »

madhusudancs wrote: post #21

I rarely come out and post on HN, but I couldn't resist. First off, congratulations on the launch! I am doing some work around Python tracing using eBPF tools and spending a lot time reading about CPython interpreter and runtime implementation. I came across this Polar Signals blog post[0] last week. Fantastic, fantastic work! I learned a ton about Python internals in just a few minutes that I had completely missed e…

Thanks for the shout out! The team has done a phenomenal job.

If you enjoyed that post, I think you’ll also like the one we wrote about native unwinding without frame pointers: https://www.polarsignals.com/blog/posts/2022/11/29/dwarf-bas...

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