Troubleshoot Adaptive Profiles boosts

Boosts are short periods of elevated sampling that capture more detailed profiling data for a service. Boosts can be started manually from the UI or triggered automatically when Adaptive Profiles detects a new service version.

This guide helps diagnose problems when boosts don’t start or don’t 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.