The profiler supports the following command line interface, which allows you to execute the profiler as part of your continuous integration builds:

/CmdLineMode[+|-]         (short form /C)
/File:<string>            (short form /F)
/ReportFormat:{Xml|Html}  (short form /R)
/Port:<int>               (short form /P)
/InputFile:<string>       (short form /I)
/Shutdown[+|-]            (short form /S)

Starting up with no options will result in the UI showing up.

Here is how we can get a report from our continuous integration build:

nhprof.exe /CmdLineMode /File:Output.xml /ReportFormat:Xml <-- starts listening to applications
xunit.console.exe Northwind.IntegrationTests.dll
nhprof.exe /Shutdown <-- stop listening to applications and output the report

This approach should make it simply to integrate into your CI process. The XML output allows you programmatic access to the report, while the HTML version is human readable.

One thing that you might want to be aware of, writing the report file is done in an async manner, so the shutdown command may return before writing the file is done. If you need to process the file as part of your build process, you need to wait until the first profiler instance is completed. Using PowerShell, this is done like this:

nhprof.exe /CmdLineMode /File:Output.xml /ReportFormat:Xml
xunit.console.exe Northwind.IntegrationTests.dll
nhprof.exe /Shutdown
get-Process nhprof | where {$_.WaitForExit() } <-- wait until the report export is completed

Licensing

Please note that from a licensing perspective, the CI mode is the same as the normal GUI mode. On one hand, it means that you don't need to do anything if you have the profiler already and want to run the CI build on your machine. On the other, if you want to run it on a CI machine, you would need an additional license for that.