---
title: Control Plane Debug Endpoints
description: Linkerd's control plane components provide debug endpoints.
---

All of the control plane components expose runtime profiling information through
the path `/debug/pprof`, using Go's
[pprof](https://golang.org/pkg/net/http/pprof/) package. This endpoint is
disabled by default but can be enabled to gather profiling data.

You can consume the provided data with `go tool pprof` to generate output in
many formats (PDF, DOT, PNG, etc).

The following diagnostics are provided (a summary with links is provided at
`/debug/pprof`):

- allocs: A sampling of all past memory allocations
- block: Stack traces that led to blocking on synchronization primitives
- cmdline: The command line invocation of the current program
- goroutine: Stack traces of all current goroutines
- heap: A sampling of memory allocations of live objects. You can specify the gc
  GET parameter to run GC before taking the heap sample.
- mutex: Stack traces of holders of contended mutexes
- profile: CPU profile. You can specify the duration in the seconds GET
  parameter. After you get the profile file, use the go tool pprof command to
  investigate the profile.
- threadcreate: Stack traces that led to the creation of new OS threads
- trace: A trace of execution of the current program. You can specify the
  duration in the seconds GET parameter. After you get the trace file, use the
  go tool trace command to investigate the trace.

## Example Usage

The pprof endpoint can be enabled by setting the `--set enablePprof=true` flag
when installing or upgrading Linkerd or by setting the `enablePprof=true` Helm
value.

This data is served over the `admin-http` port.
To find this port, you can examine the pod's yaml, or for the identity pod for
example, issue a command like so:

```bash
kubectl -n linkerd get po \
    $(kubectl -n linkerd get pod -l linkerd.io/control-plane-component=identity \
        -o jsonpath='{.items[0].metadata.name}') \
    -o=jsonpath='{.spec.containers[*].ports[?(@.name=="admin-http")].containerPort}'
```

Then use the `kubectl port-forward` command to access that port from outside
the cluster (in this example the port is 9990):

```bash
kubectl -n linkerd port-forward \
    $(kubectl -n linkerd get pod -l linkerd.io/control-plane-component=identity \
        -o jsonpath='{.items[0].metadata.name}') \
    9990
```

It is now possible to use `go tool` to inspect this data. For example to
generate a graph in a PDF file describing memory allocations:

```bash
go tool pprof -seconds 5 -pdf http://localhost:9990/debug/pprof/allocs
```