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Application Observability powered by the knowledge graph

Note

If your Grafana Cloud organization was onboarded before September 7, 2026, refer to the classic Application Observability documentation.

Application Observability powered by the knowledge graph is an application performance monitoring (APM) solution that uses the Grafana Cloud Knowledge Graph to provide deep visibility into your applications. It automatically discovers your services, surfaces performance insights, and connects metrics, logs, traces, and profiles in a unified view.

The knowledge graph-powered experience provides:

  • Service catalog with RED metrics: View all your services with latency, error ratio, and request rate at a glance.
  • Intelligent insights: Automatically detect saturation, anomalies, failures, and errors without writing custom queries.
  • Instrumentation quality: Assess how well each service is instrumented and get actionable recommendations to improve coverage.
  • Integrated signal exploration: Drill from a service into its metrics, logs, traces, and profiles without leaving the Application context.
  • Root cause analysis: Jump to RCA workbench to investigate correlated issues across your stack.

Before you begin

To use Application Observability powered by the knowledge graph, you need:

  • A Grafana Cloud account.
  • At least one application instrumented with OpenTelemetry, sending data to Grafana Cloud.

For setup instructions, refer to Set up.

Explore

Introduction
Learn what Application Observability powered by the knowledge graph is and how it differs from classic Application Observability.
Set up
Instrument your applications with OpenTelemetry, activate Application Observability, and build the knowledge graph.
Host-hours pricing
Understand how host hours are counted and how hosts are identified for billing.
Optimize costs
Reduce costs by controlling cardinality, sampling traces, and fixing host identification.
Explore your services
Use the services catalog to view performance metrics and instrumentation quality across all your applications.
Investigate a service
Drill into a service to explore RED metrics, logs, traces, profiles, and quality reports.
Configure
Configure Application Observability settings including RED mapping, metrics generation, and display options.