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Get started with Universal Profiling

On this page, you’ll learn how to configure and use Universal Profiling. This page covers:

Prerequisites to setting up Universal Profiling
Setting up Universal Profiling in your Elastic Cloud deployment
Installing the Universal Profiling Agent
Installing the Universal Profiling Agent integration

We would appreciate feedback on your experience with this product and any other profiling pain points you may have. See the send feedback section of the troubleshooting documentation for more information.

Prerequisites

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Before setting up Universal Profiling, make sure you meet the following requirements:

An Elastic Stack deployment on Elastic Cloud at version 8.7.0 or higher. Universal Profiling is currently only available on Elastic Cloud.
The workloads you’re profiling must be running on Linux machines with x86_64 or ARM64 CPUs.
The minimum supported kernel version is either 4.19 for x86_64 or 5.5 for ARM64 machines.
The Integrations Server must be enabled on your Elastic Cloud deployment.
Credentials (username and password) for the superuser Elasticsearch role (typically, the elastic user).

Interpreters

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Universal Profiling is a system-wide profiling solution with additional support for PHP, Python, Java (or any JVM language), Go, Rust, C/C++, Node.js/V8, Ruby, .Net, and Perl.

The minimum supported versions of each interpreter are:

JVM/JDK: 7
Python: 3.6
V8: 8.1.0
Perl: 5.28
PHP: 7.3
Ruby: 2.5
.Net: 6

Deployment configuration example

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The following deployment configuration example was tested to support profiling data from a fleet of up to 500 hosts, each with 8 or 16 CPU cores, for a total of roughly 6000 cores:

Component	Size per zone (memory)	Zones
Elasticsearch	64 GB	2
Kibana	8 GB	1
Integrations Server	8 GB	1

Even if you’re profiling a smaller fleet, we recommend configuring at least two zones for Elasticsearch and 4 GB of memory each for the Integrations Server and Kibana.

Set up Universal Profiling on an Elastic Cloud deployment

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To set up Universal Profiling on your Elastic Cloud deployment, you need to configure data ingestion first.

Configure data ingestion

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After enabling Universal Profiling on your deployment for the first time, select any subheading under Universal Profiling in the navigation menu to open the following page:

Click Set up Universal Profiling to configure data ingestion.

To configure data ingestion, you need elevated privileges, typically the elastic user.

If you’re upgrading from a previous version with Universal Profiling enabled, see the upgrade guide.

Programmatic configuration

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If you prefer to configure data ingestion programmatically, you can use a Kibana API call. This call can be made either through the "Dev Tools" console in Kibana or with any standalone HTTP client (such as curl or wget). In both cases, the API call must be executed using the elastic user credentials to ensure the necessary permissions.

A successful API call will return a 202 Accepted response with an empty body.

To configure data ingestion from the console, go to Dev Tools in the navigation menu and run the following command:

POST kbn:/internal/profiling/setup/es_resources
{}

To configure data ingestion programmatically using a standalone HTTP client (e.g., curl), run the following command:

curl -u elastic:<PASSWORD> -H "kbn-xsrf: true" -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
    --data "{}" "https://<kibana-host>:<kibana-port>/internal/profiling/setup/es_resources"

Install the Universal Profiling Agent

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You have the following options when installing the Universal Profiling Agent:

Install the Universal Profiling Agent using the Elastic Agent

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To install the Universal Profiling Agent using the Elastic Agent and the Universal Profiling Agent integration, complete the following steps:

Copy the secret token and Universal Profiling Collector url from the Elastic Agent Integration
Click Manage Universal Profiling Agent in Fleet to complete the integration.
On the Integrations page, click Add Universal Profiling Agent.
In Universal Profiling Agent → Settings, add the information you copied from the Add profiling data page:
1. Add the Universal Profiling collector url to the Universal Profiling collector endpoint field.
2. Add the secret token to the Authorization field.
Click Save and continue.

Install the Universal Profiling Agent in standalone mode

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The Universal Profiling Agent profiles your fleet. You need to install and configure it on every machine that you want to profile. The Universal Profiling Agent needs root / CAP_SYS_ADMIN privileges to run.

After clicking Set up Universal Profiling in the previous step, you’ll see the instructions for installing the Universal Profiling Agent. You can also find these instructions by clicking the Add data button in the top-right corner of the page.

The following is an example of the provided instructions for Kubernetes:

Universal Profiling Agent configuration notes

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Consider the following when configuring your Universal Profiling Agent:

The instructions in Kibana work well for testing environments. For production environments, we recommend setting an immutable version.
Before Elastic Stack version 8.9 the Universal Profiling Agent versioning scheme was not aligned with the Elastic Stack version scheme.
You can find a list of container image versions in the Elastic container library repository.
For Kubernetes deployments, the Helm chart version is already used to configure the same container image, unless overwritten with the version parameter in the Helm values file.
For Elastic Stack version 8.8, use v3 host agents. For version 8.7, use v2. v3 host agents are incompatible with 8.7 Elastic Stack versions.

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