Profilecli Plugin

pyroscope-skills

A Claude Code plugin that queries a remote Pyroscope server to analyze profiling data and correlate hot functions with source code in your repository.

Installation

/plugin marketplace add https://github.com/grafana/pyroscope-skills
/plugin install profilecli-plugin@pyroscope-skills

Prerequisites

• profilecli on your PATH — the skill will prompt you to download it from Pyroscope releases if not found
• pprof on your PATH, or go tool pprof as a fallback

Setup

The skill requires a connection to a Pyroscope-compatible server.

Local Pyroscope

For a local instance, only PROFILECLI_URL is needed (defaults to http://localhost:4040):

export PROFILECLI_URL="http://localhost:4040"

Grafana Cloud

Set the following environment variables:

# Data source proxy URL
export PROFILECLI_URL="https://my-grafana.example.com/api/datasources/proxy/uid/<datasource-uid>"

# Service account token (format: glsa_...)
export PROFILECLI_TOKEN="glsa_your_service_account_token"

# Optional: tenant ID for multi-tenant setups
export PROFILECLI_TENANT_ID="your-tenant-id"

Create a service account token at Grafana > Administration > Service Accounts > Add token with the Viewer role.

Usage

The profilecli-insights skill lets you ask free-form questions about service performance. Answers are backed by real profiling data and correlated with your source code.

/profilecli-insights Why is the distributor slow?
/profilecli-insights What's using the most memory in the ingester?
/profilecli-insights Show me CPU hot paths for the query-frontend

How it works

1. Discovers services — queries available services and profile types from your Pyroscope instance, correlating them with the current repository via service_repository labels
2. Fetches profiles — queries CPU, memory, goroutine, mutex, and block profiles using profilecli and analyzes them with pprof
3. Maps to source code — strips module prefixes from pprof file paths to locate the corresponding files in your checkout, and checks git ref alignment to warn if line numbers may be stale
4. Delivers a report — produces a structured analysis with a summary, ranked hot functions table, source code snippets, and prioritized optimization recommendations

The skill also highlights significant runtime functions such as runtime.mallocgc (allocation pressure), runtime.gcDrain (GC pressure), and runtime.futex (lock contention).

License

AGPL-3.0