grafana
Explain basics about flamegraph / profiles
We currently are not a very educational UI, we should make more effort to make basics about flamegraph / profiles clear:
- What is the profile type, how is it measured and what is covered?
- Why is the memory usage different from the one shown in
ps auxof the same service? - X axis is time in the timeline and resource usage in flame graph.
@simonswine Are you wanting more explanation in the docs or additional content in the UI? Or both? I have content in Cloud Profiles that I want to share back to our Pyroscope doc.
@knylander-grafana the ticket here was more created with the UI in mind, but yes ideally both.
Okay. This relates to some of the work that I'm doing in refactoring for the app (reference: https://github.com/grafana/pyroscope-squad/issues/125). It would be good to brainstorm and make sure what we have fills the level of detail you'd like to see.
I've listed the doc that we have across the various locations below. Note that we have very little in the Grafana docs. The only content we have there is the flame graph visualization panel and the data source content. I'd like to add a little more content to the Pyroscope data source docs, the same way that we have for the Tempo data source docs.
What do you think about this?
- Grafana docs for Pyroscope data source - Basic intro material, and refer people to the Pyroscope docs for technical details
- Grafana Cloud docs - Intro material with more details than what we have in the Grafana data source content
- Explore apps users - Careful focus on just enough information and use cases doc to enable people to use the app. Users are familiar with the telemetry signals but not experts. This content is mounted in Grafana and Grafana Cloud.
- Pyroscope OSS docs - This is where the meat goes. People come to the OSS docs to get the nitty gritty details.
For example, the Grafana Cloud docs might have content that gives an intro to flame graphs while the Pyroscope docs would talk about how the flame graphs are generated from the data.
Flame graphs
- Basics about flame graph visualization, https://grafana.com/docs/grafana/latest/panels-visualizations/visualizations/flame-graph/
- Flame graphs: Visualizing performance data,
- In Cloud: https://grafana.com/docs/grafana-cloud/monitor-applications/profiles/flamegraphs/
- In Pyroscope: https://grafana.com/docs/pyroscope/latest/view-and-analyze-profile-data/flamegraphs/
- Flame graph AI (Cloud only, has some additional info about what flame graphs mean), https://grafana.com/docs/grafana-cloud/monitor-applications/profiles/flamegraph-ai/
Pyroscope UI
- Pyroscope UI for Pyroscope - https://grafana.com/docs/pyroscope/latest/view-and-analyze-profile-data/pyroscope-ui/
- Cloud Profiles UI - https://grafana.com/docs/grafana-cloud/monitor-applications/profiles/profiles-ui/
- Explore Profiles doc
- View and analyze profiling data
- Grafana Cloud, https://grafana.com/docs/grafana-cloud/monitor-applications/profiles/view-and-analyze-profiling-data/
- Pyroscope, https://grafana.com/docs/pyroscope/latest/view-and-analyze-profile-data/
- Pyroscope in Grafana, Pyroscope docs, https://grafana.com/docs/pyroscope/latest/introduction/pyroscope-in-grafana/
Introduction to profiles
- Intro to Pyroscope, https://grafana.com/docs/pyroscope/latest/introduction/
- Profiling fundamentals, https://grafana.com/docs/grafana-cloud/monitor-applications/profiles/introduction/profiling-fundamentals/
- When to use continuous profiling
- In Pyroscope docs, https://grafana.com/docs/pyroscope/latest/introduction/continuous-profiling/
- In Cloud docs, https://grafana.com/docs/grafana-cloud/monitor-applications/profiles/introduction/continuous-profiling/
- Understand profiling types
- In Pyroscope docs, https://grafana.com/docs/pyroscope/latest/view-and-analyze-profile-data/profiling-types/
- In Cloud docs, https://grafana.com/docs/grafana-cloud/monitor-applications/profiles/introduction/profiling-types/
- Understand
selfvstotalmetrics in profiling with Pyroscope, (Pyroscope docs only) https://grafana.com/docs/pyroscope/latest/view-and-analyze-profile-data/self-vs-total/