Grafana Pyroscope is a continuous profiling platform for developers, SREs, and platform teams who need to find CPU, memory, and I/O bottlenecks in running applications and trace them down to a single line of code.

What it is

Grafana Pyroscope is a continuous profiling platform that collects profiling data from applications and makes it queryable for performance analysis. It consists of three main parts: the Pyroscope Server, which stores and processes profiling data and serves queries; clients and instrumentation, which ship profiles from running code; and Grafana Profiles Drilldown, a queryless UI formerly called Explore Profiles, for visualizing and analysing the data. The project is written in Go and lives in the Grafana observability ecosystem, with collection paths for Pyroscope SDKs, Grafana Alloy, and OTLP from OpenTelemetry-compatible sources.

The concrete problem is operational visibility. Teams need both proactive work, such as reducing resource consumption, improving application performance, or preventing latency issues, and reactive work, such as resolving incidents with line-level detail while debugging active CPU, memory, or I/O bottlenecks. Pyroscope 2.0 makes the v2 architecture the default and replaces the v1 design of in-memory ingesters and local disks: profiles are written directly to object storage, which simplifies operations and lowers resource usage at scale.

Key capabilities

• Collects profiles three ways: Pyroscope SDKs push data, Grafana Alloy pulls or pushes it, and OTLP carries profiles from OpenTelemetry-compatible sources such as the OpenTelemetry eBPF profiler.
• Stores and queries profiles in the Pyroscope Server, which handles storage, processing, and query serving.
• Writes profiles straight to object storage on the v2 write path, routing by service with no ingesters and no local disk.
• Runs compaction-workers that merge small segments into larger blocks in the background.
• Fans read-path queries across object storage to build flame graphs in Grafana.
• Presents Grafana Profiles Drilldown, a queryless UI, for visualizing and analysing profiling data.
• Ships as the Docker image grafana/pyroscope and the Go module github.com/grafana/pyroscope/v2.

Who uses it and how

• SRE and on-call teams use it reactively to resolve incidents with line-level detail and to debug active CPU, memory, or I/O bottlenecks.
• Performance and platform engineers use it proactively to cut resource consumption, improve application performance, and prevent latency issues.
• Teams already running Grafana use Profiles Drilldown to view flame graphs built from object storage and to drill into specific services for root cause analysis.
• Go and Linux service owners, given the project's stated language and topic focus, instrument services through the SDKs or pull profiles with Grafana Alloy.
• Existing v1 operators opt in to the v2 architecture with a flag and migrate without data loss.

Getting started

Deploy the Pyroscope Server from the Docker image grafana/pyroscope, or use the Go module github.com/grafana/pyroscope/v2 when embedding it in Go code. Client configuration and the migration from v1 to v2 are documented at grafana.com/docs/pyroscope.

How it compares

No competing continuous profiling product is named in the facts, so Pyroscope stands alone in this registry on that axis. Its stated integrations place it inside the Grafana stack, next to Grafana Alloy for collection and Grafana Profiles Drilldown for analysis, rather than beside a named alternative.

When to use it — and when not to

Self-hosting means operating the Pyroscope Server alongside object storage, because the v2 architecture writes profiles directly there, and it means running compaction-workers to merge segments in the background. Teams that cannot adopt the AGPL-3.0 licence, or that want a managed service rather than a self-operated system, should not pick it. The repository carries 400 open issues, so operators should expect an active but non-trivial queue, and v1 users must plan the flag-gated migration instead of assuming a drop-in upgrade.

docker run -it -p 4040:4040 grafana/pyroscope

brew install pyroscope-io/brew/pyroscope
brew services start pyroscope

tar xvf pyroscope_*.tar.gz
./pyroscope