Aspire Startup Profiling with OTEL

Use this skill when measuring, validating, or investigating Aspire startup performance with the CLI self-profile capture flow.

The workflow is the hidden CLI flag --capture-profile. It starts a private standalone dashboard collector, enables profiling-only OTEL instrumentation for the command and child AppHost processes, exports a trace archive, and then exits with the wrapped command's exit code.

Current Profiling Model

Profiling is opt-in and separate from reported telemetry:

• Enable profiling with ASPIRE_PROFILING_ENABLED=true or 1.
• CLI profiling spans use the Aspire.Cli.Profiling ActivitySource.
• Hosting profiling spans use the Aspire.Hosting.Profiling ActivitySource.
• DCP startup spans use the dcp.startup instrumentation scope when DCP emits startup telemetry.
• Reported telemetry must not carry profiling session IDs, high-cardinality profiling tags, or profiling spans.

Prerequisites

Use an Aspire CLI build that contains --capture-profile. From a repo checkout: