Documentationbreadcrumb arrow Grafana Cloudbreadcrumb arrow Observe and actbreadcrumb arrow Monitor applicationsbreadcrumb arrow Application Observabilitybreadcrumb arrow Set upbreadcrumb arrow Activate
Grafana Cloud

Activate Application Observability

Activating Application Observability connects your application telemetry to the knowledge graph, which discovers your services and generates performance insights automatically.

Before you begin

  • You must have administrator permissions on your Grafana Cloud stack.
  • Your applications must be sending OpenTelemetry data to Grafana Cloud.

Activate the Applications dataset

  1. In Grafana, navigate to Observability.

    The knowledge graph onboarding page displays with three dataset options: Kubernetes, Applications, and Hosts.

  2. Click Applications.

  3. In the Activate Application Observability dialog box, review the details:

    • Application Observability provides deep visibility using OpenTelemetry-native instrumentation.
    • Activation enables metric generation from traces.
    • Billing is based on host hours.

  4. Click Activate.

    The Connect knowledge graph configuration page displays. Application Observability shows as Activated.

Build the knowledge graph

After activating the Applications dataset, build the knowledge graph to start discovering services.

  1. On the Connect knowledge graph page, verify that Application Observability shows a status of Activated.

  2. Optionally, activate additional datasets (Kubernetes Monitoring, Host Monitoring, cloud providers) to enrich the knowledge graph with infrastructure context.

  3. Click Build knowledge graph.

    The status changes to Knowledge graph built and Application Observability shows as Configured.

After building, additional configuration tabs become available: Traces metrics generation, KPI display options, Logs, Traces, Profiles, Display, and RED mapping. For configuration details, refer to Configure Application Observability.

Next steps