An instrumentation overhead regulation technique regulates an amount of work performed by a client library of an investigative platform used to monitor, diagnose and solve errors associated with application development and production. The client library calculates processing resources utilized during its runtime activity to enable adjustment of the amount of work it performs based on the measured activity. An agent may determine the overhead activity impact to user application performance by monitoring processing resource metrics of the user application. The agent analyzes the calculated overhead and processing resource metrics to render decisions to automatically regulate the capture fidelity of the client library. Regulation of the capture fidelity may be implemented by modifying parameters of a dynamic configuration. If results of the analysis indicate a potential issue, the amount of work the client library performs may be trimmed to ensure that the calculated overhead of the client library and its impact on user application performance does not exceed a predetermined threshold.