Profiling data can be thousands of lines long, and difficult to comprehend. Flame graphs are a visualization for sampled stack traces, which data allows hot code-paths to be identified quickly. See the Flame Graphs main page for uses of this visualization other than CPU profiling.

Flame Graphs can work with any CPU profiler on any operating system. My examples here use Linux perf_events, DTrace, SystemTap, and ktap. See the Updates list for other profiler examples, and github for the flame graph software.