Enabling the Native Profiler for Compiled Languages

The native profiler for compiled languages (ddprof) uses OS level APIs to collect profiling data. It is ideally suited for applications written in compiled languages, such as C, C++, or Rust. Profiles sent from ddprof show up under the native runtime in the Datadog web app.

Requirements

Supported operating systems

Linux (glibc or musl)

Supported architecture

amd64 or arm64 processors

Serverless

ddprof is not supported on serverless platforms, such as AWS Lambda.

OS Settings

perf_event_paranoid kernel setting is 2 or less (see Troubleshooting)

Debugging information

Symbols should be available. The profiler cannot provide human-readable function names if the symbol table is stripped.

Installation

The profiler can be used either as a standalone executable or as a library. Skip to library installation instructions if you want to use it as a library.

Standalone

1. Download the latest ddprof release. For example, here is one way to pull the v0.10.1 release for an amd64 (also known as x86_64) platform:

   curl -L -o ddprof-amd64-linux.tar.xz https://github.com/DataDog/ddprof/releases/download/v0.10.1/ddprof-0.10.1-amd64-linux.tar.xz
   tar xvf ddprof-amd64-linux.tar.xz
   mv ddprof/bin/ddprof INSTALLATION_TARGET
   

   Where INSTALLATION_TARGET specifies the location you’d like to store the ddprof binary. The examples that follow assume INSTALLATION_TARGET is set to ./ddprof.

2. Modify your service invocation to include the profiler. Your usual command is passed as the last arguments to the ddprof executable.

   export DD_ENV=prod
   export DD_SERVICE=my-web-app
   export DD_VERSION=1.0.3
   ./ddprof myapp --arg1 --arg2
   

   Note: If you usually launch your application using a shell builtin, for example:

   exec myapp --arg1 --arg2
   

   Then you must invoke ddprof with that builtin instead:

   export DD_ENV=prod
   export DD_SERVICE=my-web-app
   export DD_VERSION=1.0.3
   exec ./ddprof myapp --arg1 --arg2
   

   ./ddprof --environment prod --service my-web-app --service_version 1.0.3 myapp --arg1 --arg2
   

   Note: If you usually launch your application using a shell builtin, for example:

   exec myapp --arg1
   

   Then you must invoke ddprof with that builtin instead:

   exec ./ddprof --environment prod --service my-web-app --service_version 1.0.3 myapp --arg1 --arg2
   

3. A few minutes after starting your application, your profiles appear on the Datadog APM > Profiler page.

Library

The library exposes a C API.

1. Download a release of ddprof with library support (v0.8.0 or later) and extract the tarball. For example:

   curl -L -o ddprof-amd64-linux.tar.xz https://github.com/DataDog/ddprof/releases/download/v0.10.1/ddprof-0.10.1-amd64-linux.tar.xz
   tar xvf ddprof-amd64-linux.tar.xz --directory /tmp
   

2. In your code, start the profiler using the ddprof_start_profiling() interface, defined in the _dd_profiling.h_ header provided by the release. The profiler stops automatically when your program closes. To stop the profiler manually, use ddprof_stop_profiling(ms) with the ms parameter indicating the maximum block time of the function in milliseconds. Here is a standalone example (profiler_demo.c) in C:

   #include <stdlib.h>
   #include "dd_profiling.h"
   
   int foo(void) {
     int n = 0;
     for (int i = 0; i < 1000; i++) {
       n += 1;
     }
     return n;
   }
   
   int main(void) {
     // Initialize and start the Datadog profiler. Uses agent defaults if not
     // specified
     setenv("DD_ENV", "prod", 1);
     setenv("DD_SERVICE", "c_testservice", 1);
     setenv("DD_VERSION", "1.0.3", 1);
     ddprof_start_profiling();
   
     // Do some work
     for (int i = 0; i < 1e6; i++) {
       foo();
     }
     return 0;
   }
   

3. Pass the include and lib subdirectories of the extracted directory to your build system and link against libdd_profiling. For the above example:

   gcc -I/tmp/ddprof/include -L/tmp/ddprof/lib profiler_demo.c -o profiler_demo -ldd_profiling
   

Deploying the shared library

The shared library must be present in the system’s library search path. Otherwise, the application will fail to start. Using the example from before:

./profiler_demo
./profiler_demo: error while loading shared libraries: libdd_profiling.so: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

Avoid this by linking against the static library.

Installing the library

Add the library to the search path by copying it to any existing search directory. To find out what your search directories are, on Linux systems, run:

ld --verbose | grep SEARCH_DIR | tr -s ' ;' \\n

Appending a search directory

Use the LD_LIBRARY_PATH environment variable to add additional search paths to the runtime linker. For example, using the directory layout from before:

export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$LD_LIBRARY_PATH:/tmp/ddprof/lib

Configuration

Configuration for the profiler can be set by command line parameters, environment variables, or a combination of both. Whenever both are provided for a given setting, the command line parameter is used.

When passing command line arguments, precede long names with two dashes and short names with a single dash. For example, --service myservice and -S myservice.

The environment, service, and service_version settings are recommended, as they are used by the Profiling UI.

Note: Parameters must be set with a value. For example, to log profiler configuration, you must either set DD_PROFILING_NATIVE_SHOW_CONFIG=yes or pass --show_config yes, rather than --show_config alone. For such arguments, yes, true, and enable may be used interchangeably to enable the setting and no, false, and disable may be used to disable it.

See the full list of parameters or use the command line.

ddprof --help

Logging

You can configure logging to one of several endpoints:

• stdout prints the logs to standard output stream (the default).
• stderr prints the logs to the standard error stream.
• syslog publishes the logs to syslog, attempting to adhere to the specification in RFC 3164.
• disable disables the logs entirely.
• Any other value is treated as a file path, with a leading / designating an absolute path.

Pidmode

When a target PID is given, instrument that PID. When this mode is engaged, any parameter after typical profiler argument processing is ignored. If the owning UID of the target PID and the profiler differ, do one of the following:

• Run the profiler as the root process instead.
• Grant CAP_PERFMON to the profiler (Linux v5.8 or later).
• Grant CAP_SYS_ADMIN to the profiler.
• Decrease perf_event_paranoid to -1 (consult your distro documentation or system administrator for details).

When a PID is specified in this way, only child processes (both forks and threads) spawned after instrumentation will be followed.

Globalmode

Global mode is intended for debug purposes. When global is set to yes, the profiler attempts to profile all the visible processes. This requires elevated permissions (for example, running as root or granting CAP_PERFMON, CAP_SYSADMIN) or setting perf_event_paranoid to -1.

./ddprof --environment staging --global yes --service_version full-host-profile

When the profiler is run as the root user, all visible processes are instrumented. For most configurations, this consists of all processes visible within the profiler’s PID namespace.

Not sure what to do next?

The Getting Started with Profiler guide takes a sample service with a performance problem and shows you how to use Continuous Profiler to understand and fix the problem.

Further Reading

Additional helpful documentation, links, and articles:

Getting Started with ProfilerDOCUMENTATION Fix problems you encounter while using the profilerDOCUMENTATION