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Data sources

Parca

Grafana Cloud Enterprise Open source

Last reviewed: April 10, 2026

Parca data source

Parca is a continuous profiling database for analysis of CPU and memory usage, down to the line number and throughout time. Grafana ships with built-in support for Parca, so you can add it as a data source and start querying your profiles in Explore.

Refer to the Parca documentation to learn about continuous profiling and how to instrument your applications.

To use Parca profiling data in Grafana, you should:

Set up Parca to scrape profiles from your applications.
Configure the Parca data source in Grafana.
Query your profiling data using the query editor in Explore.

Supported Parca versions

This data source supports Parca v0.19 and later.

Supported features

Feature	Supported
Profiles	Yes
Metrics	Yes
Alerting	No
Annotations	No

Get started

The following pages help you get started with the Parca data source:

Explore profiling data

Explore is the primary way to interact with Parca data in Grafana. Use Explore to query profiles and metrics without building a dashboard, and to select the Both query type to view flame graphs and time-series data side by side.

Integrate profiles into dashboards

Using the Parca data source, you can embed profiling data in your dashboards alongside other signals like logs and metrics. For example, you can place a flame graph panel showing CPU profiles next to a metrics panel tracking request latency to correlate performance bottlenecks with application behavior.

Plugin updates

Always ensure that your plugin version is up-to-date so you have access to all current features and improvements. Navigate to Plugins and data > Plugins to check for updates. Grafana recommends upgrading to the latest Grafana version, and this applies to plugins as well.