Continuous-profiling correlation¶

TL;DR. Stamps Pyroscope / Parca / Datadog Profiler IDs onto every span. One click from a slow trace to the matching flame-graph slice.

Continuous profiling — Pyroscope, Parca, Datadog Profiler — is the third leg of observability after traces and logs. The hard part is correlating a slow trace with the profile that captured the same time window. Without correlation, the profile is just a flame graph for the whole pod.

Pulse stamps profile IDs onto every span so the trace UI can deep-link straight to the matching profile slice. One click instead of a manual time window math.

What you get¶

Every span in your trace carries:

Attribute	Convention
`profile.id`	Grafana convention
`pyroscope.profile_id`	Pyroscope convention
`pulse.profile.url` (root spans only)	Pre-built deep link to the matching profile slice

In Grafana Tempo, that means the profile-correlation panel works without extra wiring. In other UIs, the URL is one copy-paste.

Turn it on¶

Set the URL of your Pyroscope-compatible UI; Pulse builds the per-trace deep link on root spans:

pulse:
  profiling:
    pyroscope-url: "https://pyroscope.example.com"

Pulse never bundles or starts a profiler. If you've already injected the Pyroscope agent, Pulse detects it at startup and surfaces the integration state at /actuator/pulse.

What it adds¶

The three span attributes above. Nothing else — no metrics, no logs; correlation alone is the value.

When to skip it¶

If you don't run a continuous profiler, the attributes are just noise on the span:

pulse:
  profiling:
    enabled: false

Source: io.github.arun0009.pulse.profiling · Status: Stable since 1.0.0