A new era of observability: introducing Blackfire Continuous Profiler for PHP, Python, Node.js, and Go

Continuous profiling is a powerful observability feature combining profiling and monitoring with minimal overhead. The continuous profiler involves the periodic capture of data at specified intervals. It gathers information on the functions or services that are triggered by any active request or script during those intervals.

It enables developers to gain deep insights into their application’s behavior, identify bottlenecks, and optimize code for better performance and resource utilization. This proactive approach allows for quicker identification and resolution of performance issues, ensuring the smooth running of software in live environments.

Blackfire continuous profiler available to all Production plan customers

After extensive development and refinement, we are proud and excited to announce the immediate availability of our Continuous Profiler for all Production plan customers. This highly anticipated feature is now ready to elevate your application performance monitoring and troubleshooting experience.

Blackfire’s continuous profiler comes with 5 GB of ingested data out of the box. You may purchase more depending on your needs. An extra quota can be added to the plan for €/$ 10/month per GB. If the quota is reached, top-ups are also available for €/$12 per GB.Continuous profiling provides an excellent complementary tool to the actual deterministic observability solution Blackfire currently provides for PHP and Python. It will open new grounds for PHP and Python applications’ observability while allowing to broadening engineering teams’ perspective by supporting a larger portion of their hybrid stack.

Deterministic profiling excels in accuracy and enables thorough script analysis. However, its resource-intensive nature can result in significant overhead and potential data overload, which may make the analysis process laborious.

Probabilistic profiling is lightweight and scalable, designed for comprehensive application monitoring. However, due to its periodic snapshots, it might fail to capture rapid function calls, resulting in an imperfect representation of the application’s behavior.

We will explore this awesome feature in detail in the upcoming installment. Meanwhile, we invite you to try it by upgrading to the latest version and following the configuration guides to enable continuous profiling on your applications.

Blackfire is built by developers for developers. Your insights and feedback are super valuable. We look forward to hearing from you and continuing this conversation on continuous profiling on Dev.to, Slack, Reddit, or our new community portal.

To better observability and beyond!