Optimize application performance and reduce operational costs.
Grade: A — Score: 90/100
Amazon CodeGuru Profiler is a developer tool that leverages machine learning to provide insights and recommendations for improving code quality. It continuously monitors applications in production, identifying performance bottlenecks and inefficiencies that can lead to increased operational costs.
The tool analyzes application runtime data to help developers understand CPU and memory usage, enabling them to troubleshoot performance issues effectively. By visualizing application heap and utilizing flame graphs, CodeGuru Profiler allows developers to pinpoint resource-intensive code paths and optimize them accordingly.
By addressing these performance issues, organizations can potentially reduce operational costs by up to 50%, making CodeGuru Profiler a valuable asset for teams looking to enhance application efficiency and performance.
90-Day Free Tier: $0 for 90 days
EC2 and Containers: $0.005/sampling hour
AWS Lambda: 500 hours free, then $0.005/hour
Consider switching to Dynatrace: Dynatrace offers similar application performance monitoring capabilities with advanced analytics.
Count every hour that the Profiler agent runs on each instance or container, then multiply by $0.005 after the 90-day free tier. AWS stops charging after 36,000 sampling hours per profiling group each month, which caps the published Profiler charge at $180 per group. Lambda receives 500 free sampling hours per payer account before the same rate applies, while compute and other AWS services are billed separately.
AWS describes CodeGuru Profiler as an always-on sampling profiler designed for minimal production overhead, but it does not publish one universal overhead percentage on the current product pages. Actual impact depends on runtime, agent version, workload, heap-summary collection, and deployment configuration. Measure CPU, memory, latency, and cost in a representative staging or canary workload before enabling it broadly.
AWS documents CPU profiling, anomaly reports, recommendations, and colored thread states for JVM languages and Python 3.6 or later. Heap summary visualization is available for JVM applications but not Python. Teams using Go, .NET, Node.js, Ruby, PHP, C, C++, or Rust need another profiler unless AWS expands the supported-language list.
Supported Lambda runtimes can enable code profiling from the Lambda console, which creates a profiling group when data becomes available, or use runtime-specific Java and Python integration methods. Short functions must execute often enough for the agent to collect sufficient samples, so low-frequency invocations may produce sparse profiles. Disabling code profiling in Lambda does not delete the profiling group, so delete the group separately when you want billing and retained access to stop.
Yes. AWS prices and documents profiling for EC2, ECS, EKS, Fargate, on-premises servers, and other platforms that can run the JVM or Python agent. A workload in an unsupported Region can submit to a profiling group in a supported Region, but the host needs internet connectivity and the profile data is stored in the target Region.
Amazon CodeGuru Profiler focuses on JVM and Python runtime profiles, ML-generated recommendations, and low sampling-hour pricing within AWS. Datadog supports more languages and correlates profiles with its wider metrics, traces, logs, and APM platform, while standalone Continuous Profiler starts at $19 per profiled host per month on an annual commitment. Choose CodeGuru for a narrow AWS-native profiler or Datadog when broader observability and language coverage justify the higher platform cost.
AWS says the Profiler agent collects sequences of function or method names in stack traces and cannot access parameter names or values, variable values, or application data. Method, class, package, profiling-group, and free-form resource names can still disclose operational context, and AWS warns against placing sensitive identifiers in free-form fields. Profile data is encrypted in transit and at rest.
AWS retains five-minute profiles for 15 days, hourly profiles for 60 days, and daily profiles for three years. The GetProfile API can return aggregated profiles as JSON or Amazon Ion, but a single request covers at most seven days, so export required data before it expires. Deleting a profiling group deletes the group and recommendation reports and makes its application data inaccessible.
Yes. AWS Service Terms allow it to use and store CodeGuru Profiler AI Content to improve the service and underlying technologies, including non-personal content for broader AWS AI development, with possible storage outside the service Region. An AWS Organizations AI services opt-out policy can stop this use, but the reviewed public pages do not publish a retention period or deletion timetable for service-improvement copies.
No. CodeGuru Profiler analyzes runtime behavior in live JVM and Python applications, while CodeGuru Reviewer analyzes source repositories and pull requests. AWS stopped allowing new Reviewer repository associations on November 7, 2025, even though several Profiler-branded product, feature, FAQ, and pricing pages still describe Reviewer as generally available to new users.
How AI agents (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, others) read this review page in the past 7 days. Updated weekly. View Amazon CodeGuru Profiler AI Visibility Report.