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Introduction to Adaptive Profiles

Learn more about the fundamentals and available features that help you optimize your use of Adaptive Profiles.

Fundamentals

The following concepts are key to your understanding of how Adaptive Profiles works.

  • Insight

    An insight is an artefact automatically generated by the system to draw your attention to a specific, high-value performance issue.

  • Resolution

    The level of detail being captured, primarily controlled by the sample rate and/or selection ratio.

  • Baseline resolution

    The default, low-detail, and cost-effective sampling rate applied to all segments, ensuring that profiling is always active across all your services at a minimal cost.

  • Increased resolution

    A temporary, high-detail sampling rate that is automatically triggered for a specific segment when the system detects a noteworthy event.

Prerequisites

Before you begin, ensure you have the following set up.

  • You are sending profiling data to Grafana from the service you want to monitor.
  • You have enabled Adaptive Profiles for that specific service.

How it works at a glance

Adaptive Profiles helps you find and fix performance issues faster by automatically capturing detailed data when it matters most, while lowering costs during normal operation. Once a service is enabled, Adaptive Profiles works automatically in the background.

  1. Baseline monitoring

    The system monitors each of your service’s segments at a cost-effective baseline resolution. This provides an always-on, complete historical record of performance without high costs.

  2. Anomaly detection

    The system constantly analyzes your incoming profiles. When an event or anomaly is detected in a specific segment, Adaptive Profiles automatically increases the resolution for that segment for a temporary period.

    Detailed profiles are collected for a short period (e.g., 5-10 minutes), providing rich data for analysis.

    You can also manually increase the resolution.

  3. Insight generation

    The high-resolution data is collected and then automatically fed into your Insights overview. If a valuable insight is found, the system creates an event to draw your attention to the specific performance issue. If no significant insight is found, the resolution returns to the baseline.

Your workflow

When an insight is generated, it’s your turn to act.

  1. Review the insight

    Open insights from the Overview page to immediately see a summary, recommended improvements, and an analysis of the problematic functions.

  2. Explore the data

    From the Insight, you can go to Drilldown for a more detailed flame graph to get more context and validate the findings.

  3. Resolve the issue

    Based on the recommendations and your analysis, you can decide whether to make a change in your code.

  4. Dismiss the insight

    Once you have addressed the problem or decided no action is needed, you can dismiss the insight, which moves it to your history for future reference.