---
title: "Get started with Profiles Drilldown | Grafana Plugins documentation"
description: "Learn how to get started with Profiles Drilldown"
---

> For a curated documentation index, see [llms.txt](/llms.txt). For the complete documentation index, see [llms-full.txt](/llms-full.txt).

# Get started with Profiles Drilldown

Profiles can help you identify errors in your apps and services. Using this information, you can optimize and streamline your apps.

Your investigation begins with the big picture and then drills down using profile types, labels, and flame graphs to explore your data. To learn more, refer to [Concepts](../concepts/).

> Note
> 
> Expand your observability journey and learn about [Traces Drilldown](/docs/grafana-cloud/visualizations/simplified-exploration/traces/).

## Before you begin

To use Profiles Drilldown with Grafana Cloud, you need:

- A Grafana Cloud account
- A Grafana stack in Grafana Cloud with a configured Hosted profiles or Pyroscope data source

To use Profiles Drilldown with Grafana open source, you need:

- Grafana 13.1.0 or later
- Your own Grafana instance
- Grafana 13.1.0 and later includes all Grafana Drilldown apps by default.
- A configured Pyroscope data source

## Explore your profile data

Most investigations follow four general steps:

1. [Determine your use case](../determine-use-case/).
2. [Choose a view](../choose-a-view/).
3. [Investigate trends and spikes](../investigate/).
4. Identify issues as a result of your investigation.

Give it a try using Grafana Play

With Grafana Play, you can explore and see how it works, learning from practical examples to accelerate your development. This feature can be seen on [the Grafana Play site](https://play.grafana.org/a/grafana-pyroscope-app/profiles-explorer).

[Try it](https://play.grafana.org/a/grafana-pyroscope-app/profiles-explorer)