Setup Application Observability

Application Observability requires Grafana Cloud metrics generation, opt-in to enable it, and note there is a cost associated with using this feature.

Quickstart

For local development, follow the quickstart guide for the easiest and quickest way to get started with Application Observability.

Production

For production setups, follow the production guide to set up Application Observability with a data collector.

Collect and send telemetry data

Use the recommended Grafana Alloy data collector or the community supported OpenTelemetry Collector to send data to to the Grafana Cloud OTLP gateway.

Grafana Alloy

Consult the Grafana Alloy documentation for the recommended and supported way to send telemetry data for infrastructure and applications to Grafana Cloud.

OpenTelemetry Collector

Alternatively, consult the Grafana OpenTelemetry Collector documentation to use the community supported OpenTelemetry Collector to send telemetry data to Grafana Cloud.

Resource attributes

Refer to the resource attributes documentation for the recommended OpenTelemetry resource attributes for Application Observability.

Metrics generated

Grafana Cloud generates metrics from environment spans and service dependencies to create the dashboards and service map.

The following metrics are generated from traces to power the insights and workflows:

Metric	Type	Labels	Description
`traces_service_graph_request_total`	Counter	client, server, connection_type	The number of requests between two nodes
`traces_service_graph_request_failed_total`	Counter	client, server, connection_type	The number of failed requests between two nodes
`traces_service_graph_request_server_seconds`	Histogram	client, server, connection_type	The request time from the server
`traces_service_graph_request_client_seconds`	Histogram	client, server, connection_type	The request time from the client
`traces_service_graph_unpaired_spans_total`	Counter	client, server, connection_type	The number of unpaired spans
`traces_service_graph_dropped_spans_total`	Counter	client, server, connection_type	The number of dropped spans
`traces_spanmetrics_latency`	Histogram	Dimensions	The span duration
`traces_spanmetrics_calls_total`	Counter	Dimensions	The count for the span
`traces_spanmetrics_size_total`	Counter	Dimensions	The size of spans ingested