Learn observability concepts

Lean on this guide when you or a teammate needs quick, contextual explanations of observability topics. The Assistant keeps the answers grounded in your environment so you can use them immediately.

What you’ll achieve

Ask concept questions and get concise, accurate explanations without leaving Grafana.
Tie theoretical answers back to your own dashboards, services, or incidents.
Collect summaries you can share with teammates or include in onboarding material.

Before you begin

Concept list: Identify the signals or practices you want explained.
Context: Mention how the concept applies to your systems so the answer is actionable.

Ask conceptual questions

Start with direct questions about metrics, logs, traces, or profiles so the Assistant knows which concept to explain.

What is an aggregated metric and when should I use it?

Explain how Tempo traces differ from logs.

Why should we collect Pyroscope profiles alongside Prometheus metrics?

Relate concepts to your environment

Anchor the explanation to specific services, dashboards, or incidents so the answer becomes actionable.

Provide service or dashboard context so the Assistant ties the explanation to your telemetry.

How do error budgets apply to the checkout latency panel we discussed?

Ask for examples that use your naming conventions or labels.

Capture learning materials

Save the explanations and request supporting resources so teammates can revisit the concepts later.

Request a summary you can share with new teammates.
Ask for follow-up resources, for example, Link to Grafana documentation about histogram metrics.
If the Assistant strays from the topic, restate your question politely with the missing detail.

You leave with a plain-language explanation, references to official documentation, and optional follow-up prompts for deeper study. Share the output with your team so everyone builds the same mental model.

Troubleshooting

Too much theory: specify the system or data source you care about to anchor the answer.
Need deeper dives: ask for analogies, best practices, or implementation steps.
Missing documentation links: request explicit references to Grafana docs or tutorials.
Switching topics: start a new conversation before you jump from one concept to an unrelated one so the Assistant drops old context.