---
title: "Introduction | Grafana Cloud documentation"
description: "Quick setup, quick onboarding, and ready-made observability insights."
---

# 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](/docs/grafana-cloud/monitor-applications/application-observability/instrument/)
2. [Create a free Grafana Cloud account](/auth/sign-up/create-user)
3. For testing, send your telemetry data to the [Grafana Cloud OTLP endpoint](/docs/grafana-cloud/send-data/otlp/send-data-otlp/)
4. For production, set up an [OpenTelemetry Collector](/docs/grafana-cloud/monitor-applications/application-observability/collector/)
5. [Observe your services in Application Observability](/docs/grafana-cloud/monitor-applications/application-observability/manual/)

## 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

On September 1, 2024, Application Observability changed to host-hours pricing, [update your instrumentation](/docs/grafana-cloud/monitor-applications/application-observability/pricing/) to continue using the service.

For a breakdown on host-hours pricing, refer to the [Grafana Cloud pricing](/pricing/) page.