Grafana Pyroscope Has a Free API: Continuous Profiling for Production Applications

Your application is slow. Metrics tell you WHAT is slow. Traces tell you WHERE it's slow. Profiling tells you WHY it's slow.

What Is Grafana Pyroscope?

Grafana Pyroscope is a continuous profiling platform. It captures CPU, memory, goroutine, mutex, and other profiles from your production applications — with minimal overhead (<2% CPU).

Think of it as always-on profiling. Instead of attaching a profiler during an incident, you have historical profiles for any point in time.

SDK Integration

// Go
import "github.com/grafana/pyroscope-go"

pyroscope.Start(pyroscope.Config{
    ApplicationName: "my-service",
    ServerAddress:   "http://pyroscope:4040",
    ProfileTypes: []pyroscope.ProfileType{
        pyroscope.ProfileCPU,
        pyroscope.ProfileAllocObjects,
        pyroscope.ProfileAllocSpace,
        pyroscope.ProfileGoroutines,
    },
})
// That's it — profiles are now continuously sent

# Python
import pyroscope

pyroscope.configure(
    application_name="my-python-app",
    server_address="http://pyroscope:4040",
)
# Profiling is now active

// Java — just add the agent
// java -javaagent:pyroscope.jar -Dpyroscope.application.name=my-app -jar app.jar

The Query API

# Get profile data
curl 'http://pyroscope:4040/pyroscope/render?query=my-service.cpu&from=now-1h&until=now&format=json'

# List applications
curl 'http://pyroscope:4040/pyroscope/api/apps'

# Label values
curl 'http://pyroscope:4040/pyroscope/label-values?label=__name__'

Why Continuous Profiling

1. Find the exact function — Not "the API is slow" but "json.Marshal in handlers.go:142 takes 340ms."

2. Compare time periods — Diff profiles from before and after a deploy. See exactly what got slower.

3. Optimize costs — A fintech company found one function consuming 40% of CPU. One optimization saved $12,000/month in cloud costs.

4. Correlate with metrics and traces — In Grafana, click from a slow trace span directly to its CPU profile.

Quick Start

docker run -p 4040:4040 grafana/pyroscope:latest
# UI at http://localhost:4040

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Building performance-critical systems? Check out my developer tools or email [e-mail].