---
title: "Understand your data | Grafana Cloud documentation"
description: "Learn about the four telemetry signals—metrics, logs, traces, and profiles—and how to use them in Grafana Cloud."
---

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

# Understand your data

Telemetry signals are the data your systems generate to help you understand what’s happening inside your applications and infrastructure. Grafana Cloud supports four telemetry signals that work together to give you complete observability:

Expand table

| Signal   | What it captures                         | Best for                                     |
|----------|------------------------------------------|----------------------------------------------|
| Metrics  | Numeric measurements over time           | Trends, alerts, and aggregated views         |
| Logs     | Timestamped text records of events       | Error details, audit trails, and debugging   |
| Traces   | End-to-end request flows across services | Request paths and latency breakdown          |
| Profiles | Code-level performance data              | CPU bottlenecks and memory allocation issues |

Each signal answers different questions about your system’s behavior. Metrics tell you something is wrong, logs provide the details of what happened, traces show you the path a request took, and profiles reveal where your code spends time.

## Why telemetry signals matter

Modern applications are distributed across multiple services, containers, and infrastructure layers. When problems occur, you need visibility into every layer to find the root cause quickly.

Telemetry signals provide this visibility by capturing data at different levels of granularity:

- Metrics: give you the high-level view of system health and alert you when thresholds are breached.
- Logs: capture the specific events and error messages that explain what went wrong.
- Traces: connect the dots across services to show how a single request moved through your system.
- Profiles: pinpoint the exact functions or queries causing performance issues.

Without telemetry signals, you’re guessing at causes instead of following evidence to solutions.

## Benefits of using signals together

The real power of telemetry comes from using all four signals together. Grafana Cloud lets you correlate signals so you can move seamlessly from one to another during an investigation.

Expand table

| Benefit                     | How it helps                                                                                 |
|-----------------------------|----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------|
| Faster root cause analysis  | Jump from a metric alert to the related logs and traces without manually matching timestamps |
| Complete visibility         | See the full picture from infrastructure metrics to application code performance             |
| Reduced context switching   | Query all signals in one place instead of jumping between disconnected tools                 |
| Proactive problem detection | Combine signals to identify issues before they affect users                                  |

When your signals share common labels like `service` and `environment`, you can click through from a latency spike in metrics to the specific slow trace, and then to the profile showing which function caused the delay.

## Explore the section

[Get started  
\
Learn what telemetry signals are, how they work in Grafana Cloud, and start exploring your data.](/docs/grafana-cloud/telemetry-signals/get-started/)

[Use signals together  
\
Understand why correlation matters and how shared labels enable faster troubleshooting.](/docs/grafana-cloud/telemetry-signals/use-signals-together/)

[Workflows  
\
Follow step-by-step guides to troubleshoot errors, investigate slow performance, and respond to alerts.](/docs/grafana-cloud/telemetry-signals/workflows/)

[Query and visualize your data  
\
Explore your data using Grafana Assistant, Drilldown apps, and query languages.](/docs/grafana-cloud/telemetry-signals/query-visualize-data/)

[Reference  
\
Configuration examples, platform limits, and support resources.](/docs/grafana-cloud/telemetry-signals/reference/)