---
title: "Introduction to profiles | Grafana Cloud documentation"
description: "Learn the basics of profiling and how you can use it to monitor your applications and services."
---

> For a curated documentation index, see [llms.txt](/llms.txt). For the complete documentation index, see [llms-full.txt](/llms-full.txt).

# Introduction to profiles

This section provides an introduction to the concepts related to profiling.

These topics include:

- [What is profiling?](/docs/grafana-cloud/monitor-applications/profiles/introduction/what-is-profiling/)  
  Learn about the different types of profiling and how you can use them to understand and troubleshoot performance issues.
- [When to use continuous profiling](/docs/grafana-cloud/monitor-applications/profiles/introduction/continuous-profiling/)  
  Discover the benefits of continuous profiling and its role in modern application performance analysis.
- [Understand profiling types and their uses in Cloud Profiles](/docs/grafana-cloud/monitor-applications/profiles/introduction/profiling-types/)  
  Learn about the different profiling types available in Cloud Profiles and how to effectively use them in your application performance analysis.
- [Flame graphs](/docs/grafana-cloud/monitor-applications/profiles/introduction/flamegraphs/)  
  Learn about flame graphs to help visualize performance data.