An instrumentation trace capture technique enables software developers to monitor, diagnose and solve errors associated with application development and production. A client library of an investigative platform is loaded in a user application executing on a virtual machine instance of a virtualized computing environment. The client library interacts with an agent of the platform to instrument executable code of the user application and, to that end, loads a capture configuration that specifies, inter alia, methods and associated arguments, variables and data structures (values), to instrument. The client library inspects the executable code to determine portions of the code to instrument based on the capture configuration, which describes a degree of fidelity (e.g., a frequency) of the executable code and data to trace at runtime. Capture points of the runtime application are implemented as callbacks to the client library, which are registered with a runtime system executing the user application.