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Introduction to Adaptive Profiles

Learn the fundamentals of Adaptive Profiles and how to enable it for your Grafana Cloud stack.

Fundamentals

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

  • Profiling sample rate

    The fraction of profile events kept and stored in Pyroscope. When you enable Adaptive Profiles, all services are sampled at 10% by default, which reduces your stored profiling data while keeping continuous coverage. When Adaptive Profiles is off, services are sampled at 100%.

  • Boost

    A temporary increase in profiling sample rate for a specific service, raising it to 100%. Adaptive Profiles runs automatic boosts for 5 minutes when it detects a new service version. You can also start a boost manually and choose how long it runs.

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 access to Adaptive Profiles in your Grafana Cloud stack.

Enable Adaptive Profiles

To get started with Adaptive Profiles, first enable the feature in Grafana Cloud.

  1. Navigate to Adaptive Telemetry > Adaptive Profiles.

  2. Click Enable Adaptive Profiles.

    All services are then sampled at 10%, the cost-effective default profiling sample rate.

  3. Click Get started.

Alternatively, you can enable Adaptive Profiles from the plugin configuration:

  1. Go to Administration > Plugins and Data > Plugins.
  2. Select Adaptive Profiles.
  3. Open the Boosted Services tab.
  4. Toggle Enable Adaptive Profiles on.

How it works

Adaptive Profiles helps you lower the cost of continuous profiling without losing detail when you need it. After it’s enabled, it works automatically in the background.

  1. Reduced default sampling

    When Adaptive Profiles is enabled, every service is sampled at 10% by default. You keep continuous profiling coverage across all your services at a fraction of the cost.

  2. Automatic boosts

    Adaptive Profiles watches for new service versions, using the BuildId field in profile data or the service_git_ref label. When it detects a deployment, it boosts the affected service to 100% sampling for 5 minutes so that you capture detailed data immediately after the change.

  3. Manual boosts

    You can also boost a service yourself at any time. Boost from the Boosted services section of the Adaptive Profiles Overview page, or directly from Drilldown when you’re investigating a specific service.

For more information about manual boosts, refer to Boost services.

Deactivate Adaptive Profiles

To deactivate Adaptive Profiles:

  1. Navigate to Administration > Plugins and Data > Plugins > Adaptive Profiles.
  2. Select the Boosted Services tab.
  3. Toggle Enable Adaptive Profiles off.

When deactivated, all services are sampled at 100%. The Adaptive Profiles Overview page shows a warning at the top with a link back to the plugin configuration where you can re-enable Adaptive Profiles.