---
title: "Service overview | Grafana Cloud documentation"
description: "View RED metrics, duration heatmaps, and outbound connections for a service."
---

> For a curated documentation index, see [llms.txt](/llms.txt). For the complete documentation index, see [llms-full.txt](/llms-full.txt).

# Service overview

The Service overview tab is the default view when you open a service. It displays the primary performance indicators using RED metrics, a duration heatmap, and outbound connection data.

## Filters

The overview provides filters to refine the displayed data:

- **Runtime**: select the runtime environment.
- **Request type**: filter by inbound or outbound requests.
- **Source**: select the span metrics source (for example, `app_o11y_spanmetrics`).
- **Operation**: filter by specific operation or view all.
- **Group by** / **Group by label** / **Filter by**: additional grouping and filtering options.

## Panels

### Latency

Displays the request latency over time as a time-series chart. Use the dropdown to switch between percentiles (P95, P99, AVG). Click **Explore** to open the query in Grafana Explore.

### Error Ratio

Displays the error ratio as a percentage over time. A rising error ratio indicates an increase in failed requests relative to total requests.

### Request Rate

Displays the number of requests per second the service handles over time.

### Duration heatmap

Shows the distribution of request durations as a heatmap so you can identify latency outliers and bimodal distributions.

### Outbound and databases

Displays latency and request data for outbound calls this service makes to other services and databases.

## Comparison mode

Enable **Comparison** in the time controls to overlay data from a previous period (for example, the previous hour or day). This helps identify whether current performance deviates from typical patterns.

## Next steps

- Use [Traces](/docs/grafana-cloud/observe-and-act/monitor-applications/application-observability-kg/service-detail/traces/) to investigate specific slow or failing requests.
- Use [Logs](/docs/grafana-cloud/observe-and-act/monitor-applications/application-observability-kg/service-detail/logs/) to correlate log entries with performance anomalies.
- Add the service to [RCA workbench](/docs/grafana-cloud/knowledge-graph/troubleshoot-infra-apps/workbench/) for cross-service investigation.