Slide 9 of 10

Operations at Level 1

You don’t wait for Level 4 to use these

From day one with infrastructure monitoring, you have access to powerful operational tools. The same tools work at every level; only the scope changes.

Here’s what they look like at Level 1

Alerting

What to alert onExample
Host healthCPU > 90%, memory > 85%, disk > 80%
Integration statusMySQL connection failed, NGINX not responding
Basic availabilityHost unreachable, service down

Investigation and RCA

ToolHow you use it at Level 1
Grafana AssistantAsk natural language questions to surface root cause
ExploreAd-hoc queries on metrics and logs
Drilldown appsJump from an alert into detailed signal investigation
Logs → Metrics correlation“What was happening on this host when CPU spiked?”

SLOs

SLO ExampleTarget
Host uptime99.9% of hosts healthy
Database availability99.5% connection success rate

These same tools grow with you. At Level 2, you’ll alert on services. At Level 3, on transactions. At Level 4, on custom metrics. The concepts stay the same; only the scope changes.

Script

Here’s something important: you don’t have to wait until Level 4 to use operational tools like alerting and investigation. They’re available from day one.

At Level 1, your alerts are infrastructure-focused. CPU over 90 percent? Alert. Disk filling up past 80 percent? Alert. Database connection failed? Alert.

These are the basics, and they’re incredibly valuable.

When something fires, your goal is root cause as fast as possible. Explore lets you run ad-hoc queries against your metrics and logs. And Grafana Assistant can help you surface the cause without digging through everything manually.

You can even set up SLOs at this level, like targeting 99.9 percent host uptime. It’s more advanced, but it’s available when you’re ready.

The beautiful thing is that these same operational tools grow with you. At Level 2, you’ll alert on service health. At Level 3, on transaction patterns. At Level 4, on custom metrics.

The concepts stay the same. Only the scope changes.

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