Production Profiling Setup (Grafana Pyroscope)

This guide shows how to run the Pyroscope stack locally and instrument Go services in this repository. It mirrors a production-ready approach: persistent storage, provisioning, and env-driven config.

Quick Start

# 1) Start the stack (Pyroscope, Grafana, Postgres)
make start_profiling_stack

# 2) Build binaries (including Pyroscope-enabled apps)
make build

# 3) Generate 100k events with continuous profiling enabled
make run_pyroscope_generator

# 4) Load events into Postgres with continuous profiling enabled
make run_pyroscope_loader

# UIs
# Pyroscope: http://localhost:4040
# Grafana:  http://localhost:3000  (admin/admin)

Stack Startup

Requirements: Docker Desktop, Make, Go 1.24+
Start Pyroscope, Grafana, and Postgres:

make start_profiling_stack

Services:
- Pyroscope: http://localhost:4040
- Grafana: http://localhost:3000 (admin/admin)

Build and Run the Examples

Build all binaries:

make build

Run Pyroscope-enabled generator (writes JSON file):

make run_pyroscope_generator

Run Pyroscope-enabled loader (loads JSON into Postgres):

make run_pyroscope_loader

Both apps push profiles to Pyroscope automatically. In the UI you’ll see:

interviewing-golang.generator
interviewing-golang.loader

Configuration

The profilers are configured via environment variables:

PYROSCOPE_SERVER_ADDRESS (default http://localhost:4040)
PYROSCOPE_APPLICATION_NAME (default set by binary)
PYROSCOPE_TENANT_ID (optional)
PYROSCOPE_TAGS (e.g., env=dev,service=generator,version=1.0.0)

Troubleshooting

Profiles not visible:
- Ensure Pyroscope is reachable at PYROSCOPE_SERVER_ADDRESS
- Check tags and app names in the UI filters
Grafana datasource missing: provisioning is mounted in docker-compose; restart Grafana container
Docker daemon issues: start Docker Desktop first

Production Profiling Setup