Pyroscope

Market position

Pyroscope was a standalone vendor in continuous profiling, a category Grafana Labs describes as the fourth pillar of observability. Commentary at the time of the acquisition noted that continuous profiling may function more as a feature of larger observability platforms than as a standalone product, particularly amid consolidation of infrastructure spending. The open source project built a substantial community, cited at 7.2k GitHub stars in March 2023 and 11.6k stars on the current grafana/pyroscope repository.

The product focuses specifically on continuous profiling as a distinct observability signal, offering line-level attribution of resource usage, broad multi-language instrumentation including eBPF-based collection without code changes, and native correlation of profiles with metrics, logs and traces inside Grafana.

Technology

The system samples profiling data from applications and ships it to a Pyroscope server. Instrumentation options include language SDKs for Go, Java, Python, Ruby, Node.js, .NET and Rust, eBPF-based profiling that collects data directly from the Linux kernel, the Grafana Alloy agent, and OTLP ingestion from OpenTelemetry-compatible sources. The original server used the BadgerDB key-value store; the current architecture is a multi-tenant, microservices-based aggregation system with horizontally scalable components and deployment modes, and Pyroscope 2.0 writes profiles directly to object storage with background compaction workers merging small segments into larger blocks. Query results are rendered as flame graphs and tables in the Pyroscope UI, Grafana, or Grafana Profiles Drilldown. The Python agent uses py-spy for stack sampling and a Rust crate to send profiles to the server, and is distributed under Apache-2.0.

Go-to-market

Adoption was driven by the open source project and its community — GitHub distribution, Docker, Homebrew and binary releases, Helm/Kubernetes deployment, a live demo, Slack community, and a Grafana plugin integration from mid-2021 — with conversion to the hosted Pyroscope Cloud product. Post-acquisition, distribution runs through Grafana and Grafana Cloud, where Profiles Drilldown is pre-installed.

Software engineering, DevOps and platform teams running cloud-native and Kubernetes-based workloads who need to reduce resource consumption, improve application performance, and debug CPU, memory and I/O bottlenecks. Named customers before the acquisition included Sensor Tower, Confluent, Line and Plaid.

Geography

The company was headquartered in the United States, with founders and collaborators distributed across locations including London, Oakland and France.

History

Pyroscope was founded by Ryan Perry and Dmitry Filimonov and backed by Y Combinator; the open source project integrated with Grafana via a plugin from mid-2021 and the company raised a seed round in 2021. By March 2023 the project had accumulated roughly 7,200 GitHub stars and the company also sold a hosted Pyroscope Cloud product. On March 15, 2023, Grafana Labs announced its acquisition of Pyroscope and the merger of the Pyroscope project with Grafana Phlare under the name Grafana Pyroscope, with Pyroscope Cloud subsequently becoming Grafana Cloud Profiles. Development has continued within Grafana Labs, including a Pyroscope 2.0 release that made a new object-storage-based v2 architecture the default.

Risks & controversies

Coverage of the acquisition noted that continuous profiling may be better suited as a feature within a larger observability platform than as a standalone product, especially as companies consolidate infrastructure spending — a dynamic that constrained Pyroscope's independent path.