[HN Gopher] Phlare: open-source database for continuous profilin... ___________________________________________________________________ Phlare: open-source database for continuous profiling at scale Author : PaulWaldman Score : 177 points Date : 2022-11-02 15:28 UTC (7 hours ago) (HTM) web link (grafana.com) (TXT) w3m dump (grafana.com) | kapilvt wrote: | its a db, anything for ingesting.. ideally an open telemetry | ingester? | | [update] hmm.. per docs wants pprof format and an agent. | https://grafana.com/docs/phlare/latest/operators-guide/confi... | | language support | https://grafana.com/docs/phlare/latest/operators-guide/confi... | | re multi-lang support via pprof - afaics python hasn't been | touched in years, java is shiny new albeit also first party, in | golang pprof is native, and rust pprof seems active. | RedShift1 wrote: | What about maintenance on the existing projects? Open issues on | Github: | | Grafana: 2.6k issues, 275 PRs | | Loki: 531 issues, 113 PRs | | Mimir: 305 issues, 40 PRs | | Tempo: 159 issues, 19 PRs | [deleted] | mrtweetyhack wrote: | [deleted] | Rperry2174 wrote: | I suspect this is partially because internal efforts and | agendas take priority over open source community at this point. | | For example, I created an issue requesting a flamegraph | visualization in grafana[1] and now it makes sense that they | didn't initially respond because they were building it | internally in secret and didn't want to spoil the big reveal | (when they did respond they did mention that it was a secret). | | They're also less incentivized now to tend to issues and PRs | that help others outside of their ecosystem (i.e. competing | logs, metrics, tracing, profiling, etc products). | | [1] https://github.com/grafana/grafana/issues/53723 | PaulWaldman wrote: | >Sorry for this being a bit secret until now but we tried to | quickly build and iterate something usable. There isn't much | documentation for it as it is behind feature flag it's not a | GA feature but hope that will come soon. | | Secrets kinda conflict with the whole Open part of OSS. | onedr0p wrote: | While they are open-source projects, I bet their software is | still driven by customer feedback. I wouldn't put it past them | to prioritize paying customer requests which takes time away | from implementing features, doing bugfixes or code review. | madeofpalk wrote: | I don't think it's fair to say that paying customer feedback | is prioritised at the expense of the open-source community. | | The thing with the core Grafana product being open source is | that there's not that much dissimilarity between | paying/enterprise Grafana users, and open-source users. | Feedback from one set will almost always work in favor for | the other. | shamiln wrote: | Is there any observability product that Grafana Labs doesn't | produce? | [deleted] | posnet wrote: | Would love to see this integrate with magic trace [1]. I'll need | to look at the code for the flamegraph plugin, because handling | nanosecond timestamps in flamegraphs seems to break most tools | due to float precision. | | (1) https://github.com/janestreet/magic-trace | mdaniel wrote: | > Make sure the system you want to trace is supported. The | constraints that most commonly trip people up are: VMs are | mostly not supported, Intel only (Skylake2 or later), Linux | only. | | I'd guess this rules out AWS as well as containers, too, right? | posnet wrote: | It works on metal instances. | dang wrote: | Another ongoing thread, presumably related: | | _Grafana Faro: An open source project for front end application | observability_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33439799 - | Nov 2022 (2 comments) | candiddevmike wrote: | Why can't one storage thing be used for everything instead of | disparate datastores? I need Loki for logs, Tempo for traces, | Prometheus for metrics, and now Phlare for profiling. Three of | those are using object storage under the covers, why not one | datastore to rule them all? | beebmam wrote: | There are (vastly) different stream compression techniques | based on object type, optimized per scenario. | stormbeard wrote: | This can't be the reason- lots of datastores let you | customize the compression scheme of various subsets of data. | beberlei wrote: | MySQL had the fix for this many years ago, storage engines :) | chrnola wrote: | See also: https://pyroscope.io/ | mnutt wrote: | Other than a reference to ebpf at the end, it wasn't super clear | to me where the profiles come from and what they support. Phlare | itself is just a database for storing/querying profiles, right? | PaulWaldman wrote: | >Phlare itself is just a database for storing/querying | profiles, right? | | Sounds like it, with the addition of a Grafana panel. It seems | like there is a bit of overlap between this and the other | products like Tempo, Loki, and Mimir. This graphic seems to | indicate it stands independently though, aside from Grafana | visualizations. | https://grafana.com/static/assets/img/diagrams/grafana-diagr... | mnutt wrote: | Elsewhere they reference making updates to the Grafana Agent | in the future, but it's hard to say what "scrape profiles" | means. | | But I really, really like the idea. Often when I want to test | the performance of a change I'll launch test and control | canary instances with a small percentage of live traffic, run | perf against each, collect the data, load it into a local | https://profiler.firefox.com/, and try to compare the | differences. It would be awesome to automate that process. | Beyond that, I often keep notes about the tests but the | profiles themselves are a real pain to store and catalogue. | gouthamve wrote: | Currently Phlare supports pprof which exposes profiling | data on a http endpoint. | | We need to pull these profiles in at a regular interval by | hitting the HTTP endpoint and we call this "scraping | profiles". | | This is very similar to how Prometheus.io works. | dig1 wrote: | Thanks Grafana team, but no thanks. I've been using Grafana for | years, but I started to be cautious with them, when they began to | shift things around, probably due VC pressure for more $$$ or | internal bureaucracy. First, they change the license to AGPL3 - I | don't mind it, but a sudden license change (from a more open | Apache license to a more restrictive AGPL) should raise some | eyebrows. | | Second, when you go to download OSS version, they will first nag | you with the cloud version (I'm _downloading_ that thing, not | signing up!), then will, by default, link to the enterprise | version. Something similar Elastic has done for years. | | Also, their cloud offering advertises "Free Forever" (whatever) - | we all know how these things end ;) | codegeek wrote: | Honestly, I see the same pattern with all OSS products that are | funded by VC. I guess they have to show those growth numbers. I | don't have a problem with them trying to make money but OSS | almost seems like a gimmick/dangling carrot to really just | signup for their cloud version. I would rather have them be | honest. | [deleted] | nobodycorporeal wrote: | doesnt seem to work | agilob wrote: | I've been using pyroscope oss for about a year now. It's more | mature, supports more agents, but isn't as interactive as Phlare. | It integrates with Promethues and Grafana. No complaints, it's | pretty good. | | https://pyroscope.io/docs/ | | Edit: | | Just tried to run it in Grafana, but it's not easy. Datasource | for Phlare is not in a stable grafana image: | --set image.repository=aocenas/grafana \ --set | image.tag=profiling-ds-2 \ | | flamegraph plugin is in beta behind feature flag | | https://grafana.com/docs/grafana/next/panels-visualizations/... | | >Note: This panel is currently in beta & behind the flameGraph | feature toggle. | | With these two issues in mind, announcement of this product feels | a bit rushed just to show it during ObservabilityCON, when I | can't run it locally with stable images and plugins. I hope to | see it release in mainstream repos soon! | Sytten wrote: | Is it just me that finds the whole grafana stack so confusing. | Too many tools not that well integrated. I dont even know where | to start... | PanosJee wrote: | Have you tried netdata? | ggregoire wrote: | I just checked their website and they have 4 products listed | under "Products"... | | Grafana is obviously the main one, their original product and | the most popular one. It's to aggregate data from various | sources and make dashboards. | | Loki is a logs collector that I personally didn't try but I | think it's popular. They released it after Grafana. | | I don't know the third one. | | The last one seems to be a wrapper around Prometheus (a metrics | collector/database). | | Fair to assume you should start with Grafana. For the source, | if you don't have a Prometheus instance, you can test it with | any SQL database. | [deleted] | ren_engineer wrote: | I think their goal is for Grafana to be the abstraction layer | for every datastore. You just hook up their specialized cloud | hosted datastore for each type of data and then plugin Grafana | and don't even think about it much. | | Basically they are churning out all these different projects | that just need to be "good enough" from a performance | perspective | soitgoes511 wrote: | I have used Grafana in conjunction with Influxdb (1.x & 2.x), | postgresql, mssql and mariadb with little issue for ~5 years. I | have not dipped my toes in the water experimenting with the log | aggregators. Some of the 3rd party plugins have been difficult | to use and there are some odd bugs here and there (histograms | on older versions finding the proper xmin and xmax). What | specifically has been confusing? ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2022-11-02 23:00 UTC)