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Your progress

You’ve built Level 1 infrastructure observability capabilities

Hierarchy of Observability Needs

You can now answer key infrastructure questions

  • What’s happening with my systems? (Metrics)
  • What errors and patterns exist in my infrastructure? (Logs)

Skills you gained

  • Queryless exploration for metrics and logs
  • Visual pattern detection and anomaly spotting
  • Dashboard integration for permanent monitoring
  • Self-service investigation for your team

Continue building your foundation

Level 1 infrastructure (this course):

  • Metrics Drilldown for infrastructure metrics
  • Logs Drilldown for log analysis

Level 2 application observability (next course):

  • Traces Drilldown for distributed request flows and latency
  • Profiles Drilldown for continuous profiling data
  • Cross-signal correlation workflows

Script

Let’s step back and see where you are in your observability journey. Remember the hierarchy of observability needs? It’s a pyramid with four levels.

Level 1 is infrastructure visibility. Can you see basic infrastructure health?

Level 2 is service visibility. Which service is causing problems?

Level 3 is transaction insights. Why is this specific request slow?

And Level 4 is custom instrumentation. What’s happening in your code?

By learning to use the Grafana Drilldown apps for metrics and logs, you’ve strengthened Level 1 infrastructure observability. Grafana Metrics Drilldown helps you investigate infrastructure metrics without writing PromQL. Grafana Logs Drilldown helps you filter and search logs without writing LogQL. Both signals are typically available immediately in most environments.

You can now investigate these two core infrastructure signals visually, without writing queries. This makes troubleshooting faster and more accessible to your entire team.

As you move toward Level 2 and Level 3 observability, you’ll add traces and profiles. These require application instrumentation and provide service-level and transaction-level insights. We’ll cover Grafana Traces Drilldown and Grafana Profiles Drilldown in the Level 2 course.

Here are some courses that can help you continue building your observability foundation.

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