Introducing Profiling GitHub Actions

We're excited to announce the Polar Signals Profiling GitHub Action!

Note: If you've been following our GitHub repositories closely you may know that a very simple version of this action has existed for some time, but never publicly talked about it, and this is the first time we put some actual work into it, so we felt it was appropriate to treat it like a launch.

What is the Polar Signals GitHub Action?

The Polar Signals GitHub Action allows you to easily capture On-CPU and Off-CPU profiling data of an entire GitHub Actions workflow, ideal for users who want to profile benchmarking runs, or just want to understand where time is spent in their CI/CD pipelines to improve turnaround time.

The Polar Signals GitHub Action is based on the Polar Signals Agent, so users get to enjoy the simplicity of wide language support, no instrumentation needed, and less than 1% overhead out of the box, all it takes is adding a single action step to your GitHub Actions workflow.

Setting it up

Setting it up is very simple.

1. Grab an API token.

Create an API token for Polar Signals Cloud.

2. Add the token as a secret to your repository.

Add a GitHub actions secret for the Polar Signals Cloud token.

3. Add the GitHub action as a step early on in your workflow.

name: Profiling Workflow
on: [push]

permissions:
  deployments: write # required for deployment links to be created

jobs:
  profile:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v3
      
      - name: Run Continuous Profiling
        uses: polarsignals/gh-actions-ps-profiling@v0.4.0
        with:
          polarsignals_cloud_token: ${{ secrets.POLARSIGNALS_CLOUD_TOKEN }}
          project_uuid: 'your-project-uuid-here' # No need to use a secret it's not sensitive, and will end up in the deployment link anyway.

Result

Once you integrate it, a deployment link to the profiling data will be automatically posted on all pull requests.

A link to profiling data on Polar Signals Cloud.

And you can instantly pull up the profiling data for the run.

Profiling data in Polar Signals Cloud for a GitHub Actions Workflow run.

Try it out!

We're committed to democratizing continuous profiling and making it an integral part of your development workflow. The Polar Signals GitHub Action represents another step toward seamless performance optimization.

Try it out today with a free 14-day trial and let us know what you think!