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Last reviewed: October 8, 2026

Parca data source

Warning

This plugin is deprecated and will only receive critical security updates. Support will end on January 2, 2027.

Parca is a continuous profiling database for analysis of CPU and memory usage, down to the line number and throughout time. You can use the Parca data source to query your profiles in Explore and to build profiling dashboards.

The Parca data source is developed and released from the standalone grafana/grafana-parca-datasource repository. Grafana doesn’t bundle it, so you build it from source and install it manually before you can use it.

Note

The Parca data source isn’t published to the Grafana plugin catalog and isn’t available in Grafana Cloud. You can’t install it with Grafana CLI, the Plugins page, or the plugins.preinstall configuration option.

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:

  1. Set up Parca to scrape profiles from your applications.
  2. Build and install the Parca data source on your Grafana instance.
  3. Configure the Parca data source in Grafana.
  4. Query your profiling data using the query editor in Explore.

Supported Parca versions

This data source supports Parca v0.19 and later.

Supported features

FeatureSupported
ProfilesYes
MetricsYes
AlertingNo
AnnotationsNo

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.

Updates

Because you install the Parca data source manually, Grafana can’t update it for you. To update, pull the latest changes from grafana/grafana-parca-datasource, rebuild, and replace the contents of your plugin directory. Refer to Install the data source for the build and deployment steps.

The Parca data source only receives critical security updates until January 2, 2027. After that date it receives no further updates.