Sampling scrape targets

Applications often have many instances deployed. While Pyroscope is designed to handle large amounts of profiling data, you may want only a subset of the application’s instances to be scraped.

For example, the volume of profiling data your application generates may make it unreasonable to profile every instance, or you might be targeting cost-reduction.

Through configuration of the Grafana Agent, Pyroscope can sample scrape targets.

Prerequisites

Before you begin, make sure you understand how to configure the Grafana Agent to scrape targets and are familiar with the Grafana Agent component configuration language.

Configuration

The hashmod action and the modulus argument are used in conjunction to enable sampling behavior by sharding one or more labels. To read further on these concepts, see rule block documentation. In short, hashmod will perform an MD5 hash on the source labels and modulus will perform a modulus operation on the output.

The sample size can be modified by changing the value of modulus in the hashmod action and the regex argument in the keep action. The modulus value defines the number of shards, while the regex value will select a subset of the shards.

Note: Choose your source label(s) for the hashmod action carefully. They must uniquely define each scrape target or hashmod will not be able to shard the targets uniformly.

For example, consider an application deployed on Kubernetes with 100 pod replicas, all uniquely identified by the label pod_hash. The following configuration is set to sample 15% of the pods:

discovery.kubernetes "profile_pods" {
  role = "pod"
}

discovery.relabel "profile_pods" {
  targets = concat(discovery.kubernetes.profile_pods.targets)

  // Other rule blocks ...

  rule {
    action        = "hashmod"
    source_labels = ["pod_hash"]
    modulus       = 100
    target_label  = "__tmp_hashmod"
  }

  rule {
    action        = "keep"
    source_labels = ["__tmp_hashmod"]
    regex         = "^([0-9]|1[0-4])$"
  }

  // Other rule blocks ...
}

Considerations

This strategy does not guarantee precise sampling. Due to its reliance on an MD5 hash, there is not a perfectly uniform distribution of scrape targets into shards. Larger numbers of scrape targets will yield increasingly accurate sampling.

Keep in mind, if the label being hashed is deterministic, you will see deterministic sharding and thereby deterministic sampling of scrape targets. Similarly, if the the label being hashed is non-deterministic, you will see scrape targets being sampled in a non-deterministic fashion.