pprof VS prometheus

Compare pprof vs prometheus and see what are their differences.

pprof

pprof is a tool for visualization and analysis of profiling data (by google)
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pprof prometheus
12 381
7,423 52,642
2.1% 1.4%
7.6 9.9
7 days ago 5 days ago
Go Go
Apache License 2.0 Apache License 2.0
The number of mentions indicates the total number of mentions that we've tracked plus the number of user suggested alternatives.
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.

pprof

Posts with mentions or reviews of pprof. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2023-01-25.
  • Profiling Caddy
    1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 15 Feb 2024
    The pprof format is not tied to Go. From my understanding, it's used within Google across multiple languages. The format is defined in the pprof repository[0], and the visualization tool is source-language agnostic. I've seen libraries in numerous languages (e.g. Python, Java) to publish profiles in pprof format. This is an indicator the pprof format has become de-facto. Grafana Pyroscope[1] is a tool that's capable of parsing the pprof format, agnostic to the source programming language, and has instructions for Go, Java, Python, Ruby, node.js, Rust, and .NET.

    My understanding is that you're searching for a combination of the profiles, metrics, and tracing. Caddy supports all 3.

    [0] https://github.com/google/pprof/blob/main/doc/README.md

    [1] https://grafana.com/docs/pyroscope/latest/

    metrics and tracing need to be manually enabled (for now, perhaps)

  • Why So Slow? Using Profilers to Pinpoint the Reasons of Performance Degradation
    2 projects | dev.to | 25 Jan 2023
    Because we couldn't identify the issue using the results we got from Callgrind, we reached for another profiler, gperftools. It's a sampling profiler and therefor it has a smaller impact on the application's performance in exchange for less accurate call statistics. After filtering out the unimportant parts and visualizing the rest with pprof, it was evident that something strange was happening with the send function. It took only 71 milliseconds with the previous implementation and more than 900 milliseconds with the new implementation of our Bolt server. It was very suspicious, but based on Callgrind, its cost was almost the same as before. We were confused as the two results seemed to conflict with each other.
  • Improving the performance of your code starting with Go
    4 projects | dev.to | 9 Dec 2022
    github.com - google/pprof
  • Proposal to Support Timestamps and Labels in Pprof Events
    1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 24 Oct 2022
  • A Generic Approach to Troubleshooting
    4 projects | dev.to | 20 Sep 2022
    The application performances in a specific code path (e.g. gdb, pprof, …).
  • Does rust have a visual analysis tool for memory and performance like pprof of golang?
    11 projects | /r/rust | 14 May 2022
    pprof is https://github.com/google/pprof, it's a very useful tool in golang , and really really really convenient
  • pprof - tool for visualization and analysis of profiling data
    1 project | /r/github_trends | 2 May 2022
  • Tokio Console
    11 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 17 Dec 2021
    Go also has pretty good out of the box profiling (pprof[0]) and third-party runtime debugging (delv[1]) that can be used both remotely and local.

    These tools also have decent editor integration and can be use hand in hand:

    https://blog.jetbrains.com/go/2019/04/03/profiling-go-applic...

    https://blog.jetbrains.com/go/2020/03/03/how-to-find-gorouti...

    [0] https://github.com/google/pprof

    [1] https://github.com/go-delve/delve

  • Cats and Clouds – There Are No Pillars in Observability with Yoshi Yamaguchi
    8 projects | dev.to | 3 Nov 2021
    And what we do in Google Cloud is that we still use the pprof. But it's a kind of forked version of the pprof because the visualization part is totally different. So we give that tool as the Cloud Profiler. So that is the product name. And then, the difference between the pprof and a Cloud Profiler is that Cloud Profiler provides the agent library for each famous programming language such as Java, Python, Node.js, and Go. And then what you need to do is to just write 5 to 10 lines of code in a new application. That launches the profile agent in your application as a subsidiary thread of the main thread. And then, that thread periodically collects the profile data of the application and then sends that data back to Google Cloud and the Cloud Profiler.
  • Is there a way I can visualize all the function calls made while running the project(C++) in a graphical way?
    8 projects | /r/cpp | 15 Jun 2021
    gprftools (https://github.com/gperftools/gperftools) can be easily plugged in using LD_PRELOAD and signal, and has nice go implemented visualization tool https://github.com/google/pprof.

prometheus

Posts with mentions or reviews of prometheus. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2024-04-12.
  • Fivefold Slower Compared to Go? Optimizing Rust's Protobuf Decoding Performance
    10 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 12 Apr 2024
    WriteRequest::timeseries is a vector (https://github.com/prometheus/prometheus/blob/main/prompb/re...) and
  • Tools for frontend monitoring with Prometheus
    6 projects | dev.to | 9 Apr 2024
    Developers widely use Prometheus as a system for operational monitoring and alerting for their projects. Here is a list of tools for monitoring frontend services with Prometheus.
  • The power of the CLI with Golang and Cobra CLI
    9 projects | dev.to | 6 Apr 2024
    Just to give an example of the power of Go for CLI builds, you may have already used or at least heard of Docker, Kubernetes, Prometheus, Terraform, but what do they all have in common? They all have a large part of their usability via CLI and are developed in Go 🐿.
  • On Implementation of Distributed Protocols
    23 projects | dev.to | 5 Apr 2024
    Distributed system administrators need mechanisms and tools for monitoring individual nodes in order to analyze the system and promptly detect anomalies. Developers also need effective mechanisms for analyzing, diagnosing issues, and identifying bugs in protocol implementations. Logging, tracing, and collecting metrics are common observability techniques to allow monitoring and obtaining diagnostic information from the system; most of the explored code bases use these techniques. OpenTelemetry and Prometheus are popular open-source monitoring solutions, which are used in many of the explored code bases.
  • Golang: out-of-box backpressure handling with gRPC, proven by a Grafana dashboard
    4 projects | dev.to | 3 Apr 2024
    Setting up monitoring for a system, especially one involving GRPC communication, provides crucial visibility into its operations. In this guide, we walked through the steps to instrument both a GRPC server and client with Prometheus metrics, exposed those metrics via an HTTP endpoint, and visualized them using Grafana. The Docker-Compose setup simplified the deployment of both Prometheus and Grafana, ensuring a streamlined process.
  • Monitoring, Observability, and Telemetry Explained
    3 projects | dev.to | 2 Apr 2024
    Alerting and Notification: Select a tool with flexible alerting mechanisms to proactively detect anomalies or deviations from defined thresholds. Consider asking questions like "Does this tool offer customizable alerting options and support notification channels that suit our team's communication preferences?" A tool like Prometheus provides robust alerting capabilities.
  • Observability at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2024 in Paris
    7 projects | dev.to | 26 Mar 2024
    Prometheus
  • Top 5 Docker Container Monitoring Tools in 2024
    1 project | dev.to | 24 Mar 2024
    Prometheus is an open-source monitoring and alerting toolkit. It is designed to monitor highly dynamic containerized systems, making it an excellent choice for monitoring Docker containers and Kubernetes clusters.
  • Install and Setup Grafana & Prometheus on Ubuntu 20.04 | 22.04/EC2
    1 project | dev.to | 14 Mar 2024
    wget https://github.com/prometheus/prometheus/releases/download/v2.46.0/prometheus-2.46.0.linux-amd64.tar.gz
  • 4 facets of API monitoring you should implement
    3 projects | dev.to | 2 Mar 2024
    Prometheus: Open-source monitoring system. Often used together with Grafana.

What are some alternatives?

When comparing pprof and prometheus you can also consider the following projects:

gperftools - Main gperftools repository

metrics-server - Scalable and efficient source of container resource metrics for Kubernetes built-in autoscaling pipelines.

jaeger - CNCF Jaeger, a Distributed Tracing Platform

skywalking - APM, Application Performance Monitoring System

tracy - Frame profiler

Jolokia - JMX on Capsaicin

parca - Continuous profiling for analysis of CPU and memory usage, down to the line number and throughout time. Saving infrastructure cost, improving performance, and increasing reliability.

Telegraf - The plugin-driven server agent for collecting & reporting metrics.

massif-visualizer - Visualizer for Valgrind Massif data files

JavaMelody - JavaMelody : monitoring of JavaEE applications

heaptrack - A heap memory profiler for Linux

Glowroot - Easy to use, very low overhead, Java APM