Embodiments of the invention distribute profiling responsibilities for a clustered application to various instances of the application that generally run on different computer hosts. In an embodiment, the profiling responsibility is measured in terms of metrics wherein each profiling agent of an instance collects metrics about that instance. The metrics are prioritized and assigned to instances such that the highest priority metrics are assigned if possible. Each metric is associated with an expected performance overhead, and the assignment of metrics to an instance is done such that the performance overhead on that instance and/or host does not exceed a threshold. Other embodiments are also disclosed.