Send profile data

To use Grafana Cloud Profiles, you must have a source of profile data, such as an application that has been instrumented to generate profiling data. This data can be used to Grafana Cloud using a Pyroscope data source.

Instrument your app for profiling data

You can add profiling with minimal overhead to your application using either:

Grafana Alloy: A component that runs alongside your application and periodically pulls the profiles from it. This mode is suitable when you want to collect profiles from existing applications without modifying their source code.
Pyroscope language SDKs: Push profiles from your application directly to the Grafana Cloud server.

For more information, refer to Configure the client in the Pyroscope documentation.

Locate your stack’s URL, user, and password

When you configure Alloy or your SDK, you need to provide the URL, user, and password for your Grafana Cloud stack. This information is located in the Pyroscope section of your Grafana Cloud stack.

Navigate to your Grafana Cloud stack.
Select Details next to your stack.
Locate the Pyroscope section and select Send Profiles.
Copy the URL, User, and Password values in the Configure the client and data source using Grafana credentials.
Use these values to configure Alloy or your SDK.

As an alternative, you can also create a Cloud Access Policy and generate a token to use instead of the user and password. For more information, refer to Create a Cloud Access Policy.

Configure the Pyroscope data source

After your app is ready to send profiling data, set up the Pyroscope data source to access and query your data in Grafana Cloud.

Every Grafana Cloud stack has a Pyroscope data source that you can use to connect Grafana with your profiling data. You can either use the built-in Pyroscope data source or create a new one.

Refer to Grafana Pyroscope data source for more information.