Set up Application Observability
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Set up Application Observability

Setting up Application Observability involves instrumenting your application and setting up and configuring Grafana Alloy.

Grafana Labs recommends that you set up OpenTelemetry components, including instrumentation and an OpenTelemetry Collector distribution, using one of the Grafana Cloud setup guides.

These opinionated guides make it easy to get started. They include all the binaries, configuration, and connection parameters you need to set up OpenTelemetry for Grafana Cloud.

Instrument your application

Instrumentation is the process of adding code to your application to generate telemetry data (metrics, logs, traces, and profiles).

Grafana Labs has three supported instrumentation solutions: Grafana Beyla, OpenTelemetry Java, and OpenTelemetry .NET.

For process-level telemetry, use our distributions of the OpenTelemetry Java and .NET SDKs, or community OpenTelemetry SDKs.

Alternatively, use Beyla, an eBPF network-level instrumentation tool. Beyla is easy to set up with no code changes and supports all languages and frameworks.

For detailed instructions, refer to the instrumentation guides.

Added resource attributes

Application Observability adds OpenTelemetry resource attributes to metrics, logs, and spans emitted by your application to enrich your data with contextual metadata. To learn how Application Observability enriches your data, refer to the added resource attributes documentation.

Metrics labels

Application Observability uses metrics and labels to present data. To learn how Application Observability uses metrics and labels, refer to the required metrics and labels documentation.

Instrumentation quality

To find out how to assess your instrumentation completeness and get recommendations on how to get more value out of Application Observability, refer to the instrumentation quality documentation.

Set up and configure Grafana Alloy

Once your application is instrumented, set up Grafana Alloy to send the telemetry data to Grafana Cloud. This involves setting up Alloy to receive data from your application, process it, and export it to the Grafana Cloud OTLP endpoint.

For detailed instructions, refer to the OpenTelemetry Collector setup documentation.

For a guided setup, use the Grafana Cloud setup guides.