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Setup eBPF Profiling on Docker

To set up eBPF profiling with Grafana Alloy on Linux, you need to:

  • Verify that your system meets the requirements.
  • Create an Alloy configuration file. For more information, refer to the Configuration reference.
  • Run Alloy.
  • Verify that profiles are received.

Before you begin

Before you begin, you need:

Verify system requirements

The eBPF profiler requires a Linux kernel version >= 4.9 due to BPF_PROG_TYPE_PERF_EVENT.

BPF_PROG_TYPE_PERF_EVENT is a type of eBPF program that can be attached to hardware or software events, such as performance monitoring counters or tracepoints, in the Linux kernel.

To print the kernel version of your docker host, run:

shell 
docker info | grep Kernel

The kernel version must be 4.9 or later.

Configure Alloy

You can configure Alloy eBPF profiler to profile local containers. To do so, use the discovery.docker component to discover local containers and the pyroscope.ebpf component to profile them

For more information about the Alloy configuration, refer to the Alloy Components reference.

Create a file named alloy.config with the following content:

alloy 
discovery.docker "local_containers" {
 host = "unix:///var/run/docker.sock"
}

pyroscope.ebpf "instance" {
 forward_to     = [pyroscope.write.endpoint.receiver]
 targets = discovery.docker.local_containers.targets
}

pyroscope.write "endpoint" {
 endpoint {
  basic_auth {
   password = "<PASSWORD>"
   username = "<USERNAME>"
  }
  url = "<URL>"
 }
 external_labels = {
  "env"      = "testing",
  "instance" = env("HOSTNAME"),
 }
}

Replace the <URL> placeholder with the appropriate server URL. This could be the Grafana Cloud URL or your own custom Pyroscope server URL.

If you need to send data to Grafana Cloud, you’ll have to configure HTTP Basic authentication. Replace <User> with your Grafana Cloud stack user and <Password> with your Grafana Cloud API key.

For more information, refer to the Configure the Grafana Pyroscope data source documentation.

Start Alloy

To start Alloy with Docker, run:

shell 
docker run \
  -v $PWD/alloy.config:/etc/alloy/alloy.config \
  -v /var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock \
  --pid=host \
  --privileged \
  -p 12345:12345 \
  grafana/alloy:latest \
    run --server.http.listen-addr=0.0.0.0:12345 /etc/alloy/alloy.config

Verify profiles are received

To verify that the profiles are received by the Pyroscope server, go to the Pyroscope UI or Grafana Pyroscope data source. Then select a profile type and a service from the dropdown menu.