Deploy Pyroscope using the Helm chart

The Helm chart allows you to configure, install, and upgrade Pyroscope within a Kubernetes cluster.

Before you begin

These instructions are common across any flavor of Kubernetes and assume that you know how to install, configure, and operate a Kubernetes cluster as well as use kubectl.

Hardware requirements:

• A single Kubernetes node with a minimum of 4 cores and 16GiB RAM

Software requirements:

• Kubernetes 1.20 or higher
• The kubectl command for your version of Kubernetes
• Helm 3 or higher

Verify that you have:

• Access to the Kubernetes cluster
• Persistent storage is enabled in the Kubernetes cluster, which has a default storage class set up. You can change the default StorageClass.
• DNS service works in the Kubernetes cluster

Install the Helm chart in a custom namespace

Use a custom namespace so that you don't have to overwrite the default namespace later in the procedure.

1. Create a unique Kubernetes namespace, for example pyroscope-test:

   consoleCopy

   kubectl create namespace pyroscope-test
   

   For more details, see the Kubernetes documentation about Creating a new namespace.

2. Set up a Helm repository using the following commands:

   consoleCopy

   helm repo add grafana https://grafana.github.io/helm-charts
   helm repo update
   

   {{% admonition type="note" %}} The Helm chart at https://grafana.github.io/helm-charts is a publication of the source code at grafana/pyroscope. {{% /admonition %}}

3. Install Pyroscope using the Helm chart using one of the following options:

   • Option A: Install Pyroscope as single binary. Use this mode only when you need one Pyroscope instance. Multiple instances won't share information with each other.
   bashCopy

   helm -n pyroscope-test install pyroscope grafana/pyroscope
   

   {{% admonition type="note" %}} The output of the command contains the query URLs necessary for the following steps, so for a single-binary setup, it will look like this:

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   [...]
   The in-cluster query URL is:
   http://pyroscope.pyroscope-test.svc.cluster.local.:4040/
   [...]
   

   {{% /admonition %}}

   • Option B: Install Pyroscope as multiple microservices. In this mode, as you scale out the number of instances, they will share a singular backend for storage and querying.
   bashCopy

   # Gather the default config for micro-services
   curl -Lo values-micro-services.yaml https://raw.githubusercontent.com/grafana/pyroscope/main/operations/pyroscope/helm/pyroscope/values-micro-services.yaml
   helm -n pyroscope-test install pyroscope grafana/pyroscope --values values-micro-services.yaml
   

   {{% admonition type="note" %}} The output of the command contains the query URLs necessary for the following steps, so for a microservice setup, it will look like this:

   Copy

   [...]
   The in-cluster query URL is:
   http://pyroscope-querier.pyroscope-test.svc.cluster.local.:4040
   [...]
   

   {{% /admonition %}}

4. Check the statuses of the Pyroscope pods:

   bashCopy

   kubectl -n pyroscope-test get pods
   

   The results look similar to this when you are in microservices mode:

   bashCopy

   kubectl -n pyroscope-test get pods
   NAME                                 READY   STATUS    RESTARTS   AGE
   pyroscope-agent-7d75b4f9dc-xwpsw        1/1     Running   0          3m23s
   pyroscope-distributor-7c474947c-2p5cc   1/1     Running   0          3m23s
   pyroscope-distributor-7c474947c-xbszv   1/1     Running   0          3m23s
   pyroscope-ingester-0                    1/1     Running   0          5s
   pyroscope-ingester-1                    1/1     Running   0          37s
   pyroscope-ingester-2                    1/1     Running   0          69s
   pyroscope-minio-0                       1/1     Running   0          3m23s
   pyroscope-querier-66bf58dfcc-89gb8      1/1     Running   0          3m23s
   pyroscope-querier-66bf58dfcc-p7lnc      1/1     Running   0          3m23s
   pyroscope-querier-66bf58dfcc-zbggm      1/1     Running   0          3m23s
   

5. Wait until all the pods have a status of Running or Completed, which might take a few minutes.

Query profiles in Grafana

1. Install Grafana in the same Kubernetes cluster where you installed Pyroscope.

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   helm upgrade -n pyroscope-test --install grafana grafana/grafana \
     --set image.repository=grafana/grafana \
     --set image.tag=main \
     --set env.GF_PLUGINS_PREINSTALL_SYNC=grafana-pyroscope-app \
     --set env.GF_AUTH_ANONYMOUS_ENABLED=true \
     --set env.GF_AUTH_ANONYMOUS_ORG_ROLE=Admin \
     --set env.GF_DIAGNOSTICS_PROFILING_ENABLED=true \
     --set env.GF_DIAGNOSTICS_PROFILING_ADDR=0.0.0.0 \
     --set env.GF_DIAGNOSTICS_PROFILING_PORT=9094 \
     --set-string 'podAnnotations.profiles\.grafana\.com/cpu\.scrape=true' \
     --set-string 'podAnnotations.profiles\.grafana\.com/cpu\.port=9094' \
     --set-string 'podAnnotations.profiles\.grafana\.com/memory\.scrape=true' \
     --set-string 'podAnnotations.profiles\.grafana\.com/memory\.port=9094' \
     --set-string 'podAnnotations.profiles\.grafana\.com/goroutine\.scrape=true' \
     --set-string 'podAnnotations.profiles\.grafana\.com/goroutine\.port=9094'
   

   For details, see Deploy Grafana on Kubernetes.

2. Port-forward Grafana to localhost, by using the kubectl command:

   bashCopy

   kubectl port-forward -n pyroscope-test service/grafana 3000:80
   

3. In a browser, go to the Grafana server at http://localhost:3000.

4. On the left side, go to Configuration > Data sources.

5. Configure a Pyroscope data source to query the Pyroscope server, by using the following settings:

   Field	Value
   Name	Pyroscope
   URL	http://pyroscope-querier.pyroscope-test.svc.cluster.local.:4040/

   To add a data source, refer to Add a data source.

6. Verify success:

   You should be able to query profiles in Grafana Explore, as well as create dashboard panels by using your newly configured Pyroscope data source.

Optional: Persistently add data source

The deployment of Grafana has no persistent database, so it will not retain settings like the data source configuration across restarts.

To ensure the data source gets provisioned at start-up, create the following datasources.yaml file:

datasources:
  pyroscope.yaml:
   apiVersion: 1
   datasources:
   - name: Pyroscope
     type: grafana-pyroscope-datasource
     uid: pyroscope-test
     url: http://pyroscope-querier.pyroscope-test.svc.cluster.local.:4040/

Modify the Helm deployment by running:

   helm upgrade -n pyroscope-test --reuse-values grafana grafana/grafana \
     --values datasources.yaml

Optional: Scrape your own workload's profiles

The Pyroscope chart uses a default configuration that causes its agent to scrape Pods, provided they have the correct annotations. This functionality uses relabel_config and kubernetes_sd_config you might be familiar with the Prometheus or Grafana Alloy configuration.

To get Pyroscope to scrape pods, you must add the following annotations to the Pods:

metadata:
  annotations:
    profiles.grafana.com/memory.scrape: "true"
    profiles.grafana.com/memory.port: "8080"
    profiles.grafana.com/cpu.scrape: "true"
    profiles.grafana.com/cpu.port: "8080"
    profiles.grafana.com/goroutine.scrape: "true"
    profiles.grafana.com/goroutine.port: "8080"

The above example will scrape the memory, cpu and goroutine profiles from the 8080 port of the Pod.

Each profile type has a set of corresponding annotations which allows customization of scraping per profile type.

metadata:
  annotations:
    profiles.grafana.com/<profile-type>.scrape: "true"
    profiles.grafana.com/<profile-type>.port: "<port>"
    profiles.grafana.com/<profile-type>.port_name: "<port-name>"
    profiles.grafana.com/<profile-type>.scheme: "<scheme>"
    profiles.grafana.com/<profile-type>.path: "<profile_path>"

The full list of profile types supported by annotations is cpu, memory, goroutine, block and mutex.

The following table describes the annotations:

By default, the port is discovered using named port http2 or ending with -metrics or -profiles. If you don't have a named port, the scraping target is dropped.

If you don't want to use the port name, then you can use the profiles.grafana.com/<profile-type>.port annotation to statically specify the port number.