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Cover image for New Blackfire.io feature: On-demand distributed profile processing 😎
Celeste van der Watt for Platform.sh

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New Blackfire.io feature: On-demand distributed profile processing 😎

Meet the brand-new feature from Blackfire.io: On-demand distributed profile processing.

We’re thrilled to announce an exciting new feature from Blackfire.io that gives you more control over distributed profiling by selectively processing sub-profiles and gain deeper insights into your application’s interactions with APIs and web services.

Introducing: On-demand Distributed Profile Processing

💡 Understanding the sub-profile challenge

Distributed profiling is designed to help understand the behavior of applications using microservices. It allows you to profile any service your application interacts with, as long as Blackfire Probe is enabled on that service.

The Blackfire profiler triggers sub-profiles for every HTTP request the main script makes. This is incredibly useful when the bottleneck you are looking for might be hidden in one of these web services and API calls.

On-demand distributed profile processing

Yet, distributed profiling might lead to a sub-profile overflow when your app relies on too-many web services. To avoid a deluge of unwanted sub-profiles, only the first 5 sub-profiles are processed in priority, leaving the others pending. While this decision was made to maintain the system’s efficiency, we also understand that, on some occasions, it could mean missing out on information.

subprofile-process-now

That’s why your profile’s “Propagation” tab now features a call-to-action (CTA) that empowers you to manually request more sub-profiles to be processed. This means if you wish to delve deeper into the subsequent HTTP requests after the initial five, you can! By giving you this control, we aim to strike the balance between automated efficiency and user-controlled detail.

To better observability and beyond! 🚀

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