prof-correctness

A small tool to make it simple to write profiler correctness tests which run known test programs and make assertions on the resulting profiles. Checkout #profiling-library-pager to get notified of test failures.

Setup

Pre-requisites

Install go >= 1.19: brew install go, choco install go, etc. Install docker.

Running Tests

go test -v -run TestScenarios # Run all scenarios

TEST_SCENARIOS="ddprof.*"  go test -v -run TestScenarios # Run ddprof scenarios

Using as a GitHub Action

You may use this repo to run the analyzer on your profiler emitted pprof files. You can do so by adding a GitHub Action Workflow to your repo, where you build your profiler and run it on an example program. After you did this, you can add a step to analyze your results and match it against your expectation:

      - name: Check profiler correctness for allocations
        uses: Datadog/prof-correctness/analyze
        with:
          expected_json: profiling/tests/correctness/allocations.json
          pprof_path: profiling/tests/correctness/allocations/

You need to provide a JSON file with your expectations and a path to where to find the pprof files.

Creating new tests

Define the dockerfile

Create a test scenario and prefix the folders with something relevant like php, ddprof, go... The dockerfile specifies how to install the profiler and run the test app. The dockerfile needs to follow rules

• set variable EXECUTION_TIME_SEC (which defines how long the tests runs for)
• output pprof data to the /app/data/ folder The /app/data mirrors the data folder in this repository.

# Define OS / Install App...
# Install profiler...
# Run things
ENV EXECUTION_TIME_SEC="60"
# Default is that test data is dropped in the data folder
ENV DD_PROFILING_PPROF_PREFIX="/app/data/profiles_"
CMD ["ddprof", "-l", "notice", "/app/build/some_app" ]

The ./profilers folder contains helpers.

Describe the expected output

Describe what you expect in a json file within the same folder. This data is captured at every run in the matching folder, so you can use it as a reference to adjust your test. Here is an example of a json file

{
  "test_name":"some_app",
  "stacks": [
    {
      "profile-type": "cpu-time",
      "stack-content":
      [
        {
          "regular_expression":";_start;__libc_start_main.*;main;a$",
          "value": 33,
          "error_margin": 5
        },
        {
          "regular_expression":";_start;__libc_start_main.*;main;b$",
          "value": 66,
          "error_margin": 5
        }
      ]
    }
  ]
}

Run your test

TEST_RUN_SECS=12 TEST_SCENARIOS="MyTestsName.*" go test -v -run TestScenarios

Cleanup test data (optional)

The tests results are written to the data folder. You can periodically clean that folder.

Troubleshooting

Export profiles through the agent

If you have an agent setup locally, you can run the command line with NETWORK_HOST=YES. Using network host will allow the docker instance to target the agent running locally. Example:

NETWORK_HOST=YES TEST_SCENARIOS="ddprof_allo.*"  TEST_RUN_SECS=13 go test -v -run TestScenarios

Slack notifications

You'll find a slack notification call in the test.yml that triggers when a prof correctness run fails. This expects a SLACK_WEBHOOK secret being set in the repository which must be a URL to a Slack workflow webhook. It passes the scenario and failed_run_url used for testing to the webhook, please make sure that the webhook is configured to accept this.