Grafana Cloud

Troubleshoot Adaptive Profiles boosts

Boosts are short periods of elevated sampling used to collect the high-resolution data required for generating insights. Boosts may be triggered manually from the UI or automatically during deployments.

This guide helps diagnose problems when boosts do not start or do not capture enough data.

Issue 1: Boosts do not start (manual or automatic)

Boosts cannot run if Adaptive Profiles cannot identify the service or ingest profiling data correctly.

Required conditions (for all boosts)

No boost of any kind can run unless:

  • Profiling data has been flowing for several minutes
  • Each profile includes a valid service_name
  • Adaptive Profiles is enabled for your stack

How to check

  • Open the Adaptive Profiles UI
  • Verify your service appears in the Service dropdown

If the service does not appear, boosts cannot be triggered.

What to do

  • Verify profiling ingestion is working
  • Confirm service_name is included in profiles
  • Ensure Adaptive Profiles is enabled

Issue 2: Automatic boosts do not trigger

Automatic boosts depend on detecting a new service version.

Version detection uses

Adaptive Profiles detects new versions using:

  • The BuildId field in profile data, or
  • The service_git_ref label

Why automatic boosts may not run

Automatic boosts do not trigger if:

  • BuildId does not change across deployments
  • service_git_ref does not change across deployments
  • Deployment metadata is missing

What to do

  • Ensure your CI/CD process updates at least one of these fields on every deployment

Manual boosts can still be triggered from the UI even if version metadata does not change. Automatic boosts require metadata to be present and updated over time.

Issue 3: Boost started but did not complete or captured too little data

A boost may start successfully but still fail to produce enough high-resolution data for later analysis.

Common causes

  • The service generates too few samples during the boost window
  • The boost duration is too short, common for low-traffic services
  • Temporary backend ingestion delays occurred

What to do

  • Increase the boost duration,for example, 10-30 minutes
  • Trigger boosts during periods of higher service traffic

A boost must capture a complete, sufficiently populated high-resolution window for insights to be generated later.