Getting Started

Hi there! thank you for trying out Pyroscope! In this guide you'll need just two steps in order to start monitoring your application's performance.

  1. Install Pyrocope Server
  2. Start profiling your application using Pyroscope Agent

If you have any questions or if something doesn't work reach out to us in our slack group or email us at contact@pyroscope.io.

You can also schedule a call with an engineer if that's easier for you. We would love to learn about your use-case and help you get started.

Overview

Pyroscope is an open source continuous profiling platform. It will help you:

  • Find performance issues in your code
  • Resolve issues with high CPU utilization
  • Understand the call tree of your application
  • Track changes over time

If you are familiar with profiling and flame graphs, then you'll be happy to know that Pyroscope:

  • Has low CPU overhead thanks to sampling profiler technology
  • Can store years of profiling data down to 10 second granularity
  • Efficient compression, low disk space requirements

There are two main components that allow Pyroscope to run smoothly and quickly: Pyroscope Server and Pyroscope Agent.

deployment diagram

Pyroscope Agent records and aggregates what your application has been doing, then sends that data to the Pyroscope Server.

Pyroscope Server processes, aggregates, and stores data from agents for speedy queries of any time range. Later you can look at the profiling data and make queries across any time range for example:

  • all of 2020
  • that one day last month when the website was slow
  • that time you deployed on a Friday night and messed up everything without knowing why

Check out our Demo Page and select any time range to see how quickly Pyroscope works!

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Step 1: Install Pyroscope Server

We provide a few different ways for you to install Pyroscope Server on Linux, macOS or run it in Docker. To find out about other ways of installing Pyroscope, or to find packages for other CPU architectures (e.g ARM) visit our Downloads page.

After you start the server you should be able to open http://localhost:4040/ and see that pyroscope server is profiling itself (pyroscope.server.cpu application).

Step 2: Start profiling your application using Pyroscope Agent

Now that you have Pyroscope Server running you can start continuously profiling your own applications. Pyroscope Agent can be run on Linux, macOS, Windows and in Docker, and supports the following integrations:

We'll be adding more platforms soon, if you want us to prioritize one particular platform, create an issue at Github or reach out to us in our slack group.

Next steps

The following topics may be of interest to you:

For a list of the minimum hardware and software requirements, refer to Deployment Guide.