Application Real-Time Monitoring Service (ARMS) provides two Go Agent editions:
Commercial: Production-grade monitoring, profiling, and alerting with broad Go version support (Go 1.18+).
Open source: OpenTelemetry-native compile-time instrumentation for teams that prioritize open standards.
Why Go requires two agent editions
Go compiles directly to machine code. Unlike Java or .NET, which run on virtual machines with built-in monitoring hooks, Go has no abstraction layer for automatic instrumentation. Continuous profiling, code hotspots, and crash event collection all require low-level, agent-side instrumentation. The open-source OpenTelemetry SDK does not yet provide these capabilities. The commercial agent fills this gap.
The open-source agent uses compile-time instrumentation through the opentelemetry-go-compile-instrumentation project. However, the scope of instrumentation is limited to what the OpenTelemetry community currently supports.
Feature comparison
Feature | Commercial | Open source |
Plug-ins | Plug-ins for a broad set of Go components and frameworks. See Supported Go components and frameworks. | Community plug-ins contributed and maintained by the Alibaba Cloud observability team: loongsuite-go-agent, opentelemetry-go-compile-instrumentation. |
Go version support | Go 1.18 and later | Go 1.23, 1.24, and later. Follows the OpenTelemetry (OTel) SDK for Go release cycle. Only the two latest Go versions are supported at any time. |
Trace context propagation | W3C, Jaeger, EagleEye, Zipkin | W3C only |
Application monitoring metrics | Supported | Not yet supported |
Alerting | ARMS intelligent alerting | Not yet supported |
Runtime monitoring | Supported | Supported |
Continuous profiling | Supported | Not supported |
Code hotspots | Supported | Not supported |
System metrics | Supported | Not supported |
Crash event collection | Supported | Not supported |
Remote configuration updates | Supported | Not supported |
Choose an edition
Use the commercial agent if you need:
Broad Go version coverage (Go 1.18+)
Multiple trace context propagation formats (W3C, Jaeger, EagleEye, Zipkin)
Full observability: application metrics, continuous profiling, code hotspots, and system metrics
Crash event collection and remote configuration updates
ARMS intelligent alerting
Use the open-source agent if you need:
OpenTelemetry-native compile-time instrumentation
W3C trace context propagation
Runtime monitoring on the latest Go versions (Go 1.23, 1.24+)
Community-maintained plug-ins