A Rails profiler is a tool used to analyze the performance of your Ruby on Rails application. It helps identify bottlenecks, memory leaks, and other performance issues, allowing you to optimize your code and improve overall web application speed. Profilers are essential in ensuring your web application runs smoothly and delivers a better user experience.

When we announced that Pyroscope was joining Grafana Labs back in March, we expressed our excitement that uniting the Pyroscope and Phlare open source projects and teams would accelerate our plan to add continuous profiling to Grafana Cloud. Just two and a half months later, that day has come! We are proud to announce that Grafana Cloud Profiles is now available in public preview for all Grafana Cloud users, both paid and free.

Users are complaining about slow load times and you’ve thrown logs, traces, and metrics — heck, the entire kitchen sink of performance monitoring — at your application, but you still can’t figure out the source of the bottleneck. Maybe you missed adding instrumentation to something in the critical path, or you’re simply testing in an environment vastly different from the ones your users are experiencing in production.

The core functionality of the Java Instrumentation API lies in its ability to modify the bytecode of classes being executed by the virtual machine. This capability allows for a range of monitoring tasks to be carried out, such as event recording and data gathering, which can provide valuable insights into an application's performance and behavior.

We are happy to announce that Pyroscope, the company behind the eponymous open source continuous profiling project, is now part of Grafana Labs. With this acquisition, we will be merging the Pyroscope project and Grafana Phlare, the project we launched last year, under the new name Grafana Pyroscope. We first met the Pyroscope team, led by co-founders Ryan Perry and Dmitry Filimonov, as they were graduating from Y Combinator. Like Grafana Labs, they have open source in their DNA.

A couple months ago, we launched Profiling in alpha for users on Python and Node.js SDKs — today, we’re moving Profiling for Python and Node.js to beta. Profiling is free to use while in beta — more updates to come when we near GA. Profiling is a critical tool for helping catch performance bottlenecks in your code. Sentry’s profiler gets you down to the exact file/line number in your code that is causing a slow-running query.

This is part 2 of a 3-part series on profiling. If you’re not yet familiar with the what profiling is, check out the first part in our series. By this point, you’re probably already convinced that good performance is important for your app’s success. There are many tools available for performance, but profiling in production with a modern profiling tool is one of the easiest and most effective ways to get a full understanding of your app’s performance.

The performance of your app matters. From ensuring a good user experience to retaining users, performance makes a difference in your app’s success. Using the right tools can make it easier to ensure your code is meeting your performance goals, before you have to switch to a bigger EC2 instance or users start complaining. One of the best tools in a developer’s toolbox for ensuring good performance is profiling.