Documentation Grafana Pyroscope Configure the client to send profiles Grafana Alloy Profiling with eBPF Set up on Linux

Set up eBPF profiling on Linux

To set up eBPF profiling with Grafana Alloy on Linux, you need to:

• Verify that your system meets the requirements.
• Install Alloy.
• Create an Alloy configuration file. For more information, refer to Configuration reference.
• Run Alloy.
• Finally, verify that profiles are received.

Before you begin

Before you begin, you need:

• A Pyroscope server where Alloy can send profiling data.
• Access to Grafana with the Grafana Pyroscope data source provisioned.

Verify system meets the requirements

The eBPF profiler requires a Linux kernel version >= 4.9 (due to BPF_PROG_TYPE_PERF_EVENT).

BPF_PROG_TYPE_PERF_EVENT is a type of eBPF program that can be attached to hardware or software events, such as performance monitoring counters or tracepoints, in the Linux kernel.

To print the kernel version of machine, run:

shell Copy

uname -r

Make sure you have a kernel version >= 4.9.

Install Alloy

Follow the installation instructions to download and install Alloy for your current Linux distribution.

Configure Alloy

To configure the Alloy eBPF profiler to profile local processes, use discovery.process component and add a default target in the pyroscope.ebpf component. All processes are profiled and grouped under the default target.

Create a file named alloy.config with the following content:

alloy Copy

discovery.process "all" {

}

discovery.relabel "alloy" {
    targets = discovery.process.all.targets
    // Filter needed processes
    rule {
        source_labels = ["__meta_process_exe"]
        regex = ".*/alloy"
        action = "keep"
    }
}

pyroscope.ebpf "instance" {
 forward_to     = [pyroscope.write.endpoint.receiver]
 targets = discovery.relabel.alloy.output
}

pyroscope.scrape "local" {
  forward_to     = [pyroscope.write.endpoint.receiver]
  targets    = [
    {"__address__" = "localhost:12345", "service_name"="grafana/alloy"},
  ]
}

pyroscope.write "endpoint" {
 endpoint {
  basic_auth {
   password = "<PASSWORD>"
   username = "<USERNAME>"
  }
  url = "<URL>"
 }
 external_labels = {
  "env"      = "prod",
  "instance" = env("HOSTNAME"),
 }
}

For information about configuring Alloy, refer to Grafana Alloy on Kubernetes.

For information about the specific blocks used, refer to the Grafana Alloy Reference and discovery.process.

Replace the <URL> placeholder with the appropriate server URL. This could be the Grafana Cloud URL or your own custom Pyroscope server URL.

If you need to send data to Grafana Cloud, you’ll have to configure HTTP Basic authentication. Replace <User> with your Grafana Cloud stack user and <Password> with your Grafana Cloud API key.

For more information, refer to the Configure the Grafana Pyroscope data source documentation.

Start Alloy

To start the Alloy, run:

shell Copy

alloy run alloy.config

If you see the following error:

shell Copy

level=error msg="component exited with error" component=pyroscope.ebpf.local_pods err="ebpf profiling session start: load bpf objects: field DisassociateCtty: program disassociate_ctty: map events: map create: operation not permitted (MEMLOCK may be too low, consider rlimit.RemoveMemlock)"

Make sure you’re running Alloy with root privileges which are required for the eBPF profiler to work.

Verify profiles are received

To verify that the profiles are received by the Pyroscope server, go to the Pyroscope UI or Grafana Pyroscope data source. Select a profile type and a service from the drop-down menu.