Slide 3 of 7

Application Observability

Your command center for service visibility

Application Observability provides three core capabilities:

CapabilityWhat it doesProblems solved
Service InventoryAuto-discovered list of all servicesNo more stale spreadsheets or “what services do we have?”
RED MetricsRate, Errors, Duration per serviceConsistent health metrics without custom dashboards
Service MapLive dependency visualizationSee actual traffic patterns, not outdated architecture docs

What you see at a glance

For each service…
Name, namespace, technology stack
Request rate, error rate, latency (p95)
Upstream and downstream dependencies
Whether it’s instrumented or has gaps

Questions answered

With Application Observability, you can answer…
What services are running in production?
Which service has elevated error rates right now?
What’s downstream of this failing service?
Which services aren’t sending their own traces?

The foundation

One app. Three capabilities. The answer to “which service is the problem?”

Script

Application Observability is your command center for Level 2. It’s a single app in Grafana Cloud that gives you three essential capabilities.

First, the Service Inventory. Every service sending traces to Grafana Cloud appears here automatically. You see what services exist, what technology they use, and whether they’re instrumented. No spreadsheets, no stale docs.

Second, RED metrics. Rate, Errors, Duration. Three numbers that tell you if a service is healthy. These are derived automatically from your traces, so every service gets consistent health metrics without custom dashboards.

Third, the Service Map. A live visualization of how your services connect, generated from actual traffic. When something breaks, you can trace the dependency chain visually instead of guessing.

Together, these answer the core Level 2 question: which service is the problem? You see all your services, their health, and how they connect, all in one place.