Introduction

Introduction

This project is a bridge between profefe and Kubernetes. At the moment it serves two different binaries:

• kubectl-profefe a kubectl plugin that helps you to capture pprof profiles, storing them locally or in profefe. It uses port-forwarding to expose the pprof port locally.
• kprofefe is a cli that you can run as a cronjob in your kubernetes cluster. It discovers running pods in your clusters, it downloads profiles and it pushes them in profefe.

NB: if your configuration does not allow you to do kubectl port-forward the kubectl plugin will not work.

How it works

Golang has an http handler that exposes pprof over http, via annotation we can specify if a pod has profiles to capture and with other annotations we can configure path and port.

The annotations are:

• profefe.com/enable=true is the annotation that tells kube-profefe to capture profiles from that pod.
• profefe.com/port=8085 tells kube-profefe where to look for a pprof http server. By default it is 6060.
• profefe.com/service=frontend tells kube-profefe the name of the service usable to lookup the profile. If the annotation is not specified it uses the pod name. My suggestion is to set this annotation because pods are ephemeral and lookup by pod name may be hard to do.
• profefe.com/path=/debug/pprof tells kube-profefe where to look for a pprof http server. By default it is /debug/pprof.