Documentation Grafana Cloud Monitor applications Application Observability Introduction

Introduction

Application Observability is an application performance monitoring (APM) solution powered by Grafana Cloud, OpenTelemetry, and the Prometheus data-model.

To get started with Application Observability follow these steps:

1. Instrument your application
2. Create a free Grafana Cloud account
3. For testing, send your telemetry data to the Grafana Cloud OTLP endpoint
4. For production, set up an OpenTelemetry Collector
5. Observe your services in Application Observability

Why use Application Observability?

Application Observability helps software engineers to reduce the time it takes to detect anomalies, identify root causes, and fix problems.

• OpenTelemetry: prevent vendor lock-in and use open standards to collect metrics, logs, and traces
• Detect anomalies: use pre-configured dashboards to detect anomalies in your services and applications
• Identify root causes: use pre-configured dashboards to identify the root cause of a problem

Host-based pricing

Application Observability uses host-hours pricing. Hosts are identified automatically from OpenTelemetry resource attributes that Grafana Alloy, the OpenTelemetry Collector, OpenTelemetry SDKs, and Beyla emit by default. For details, refer to the host-hours pricing documentation.

For a breakdown on host-hours pricing, refer to the Grafana Cloud pricing page.