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Grafana Cloud

Set up Application Observability

Setting up Application Observability powered by the knowledge graph involves instrumenting your applications with OpenTelemetry, then activating the Applications dataset and building the knowledge graph.

Prerequisites

  • A Grafana Cloud account on a plan that supports the knowledge graph.
  • At least one application instrumented with OpenTelemetry, sending OTLP data to Grafana Cloud.

Steps

  1. Set up instrumentation: Instrument your applications with OpenTelemetry and configure Grafana Alloy to send data to Grafana Cloud.
  2. Activate Application Observability: Enable the Applications dataset and build the knowledge graph.

Uninstrumented services

Application Observability also detects external services that your applications communicate with, even when those services don’t send telemetry directly. For details, refer to Uninstrumented services.

Next steps

After instrumentation and activation, navigate to Observability > Application in the Grafana menu to view your services in the services catalog.