The present invention provides a method and system for capturing the call stack of a currently-running thread at the time a profiler interrupt occurs. The thread context of the thread is determined before a full push of the thread context is performed by the CPU architecture. The hardware state at the time of the interrupt is used to aid in determining which portions of memory to search for portions of the thread context. Based on the hardware state and the software state of the thread at the time of the interrupt the thread context is captured. Code may also be injected into a thread to capture a thread's call stack. The state of the thread is altered to induce the thread to invoke the kernel's call stack API itself, using its own context.