---
title: "Operations at Level 2 | Grafana Labs"
description: "Alerting, dashboards, and SLOs for services"
---

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

## Service-level operations

At Level 2, your operational practices shift from infrastructure to **services**. You’re now alerting on service health, building service dashboards, and defining SLOs around availability.

### Alerting

| What to alert on   | Example                                        |
|--------------------|------------------------------------------------|
| Service error rate | Checkout service errors > 1%                |
| RED metrics        | Request rate dropped 50%, duration P95 > 2s |
| Dependency health  | Payment gateway latency increasing             |

### SLOs and error budgets

| SLO type     | Example                            |
|--------------|------------------------------------|
| Availability | 99.5% of requests successful       |
| Latency      | 95% of requests < 500ms         |
| Error budget | Alert when burning budget too fast |

### Dashboards

| Dashboard type          | What you see                          |
|-------------------------|---------------------------------------|
| Service health overview | All services, RED metrics at a glance |
| Service detail          | Deep dive into one service’s metrics  |
| Dependency map          | Service graph with health indicators  |

### Investigation

| Tool                  | How you use it at Level 2                    |
|-----------------------|----------------------------------------------|
| **Service Inventory** | Find the service, see its health at a glance |
| **Service Graph**     | Trace dependencies, find upstream issues     |
| **Explore**           | Query service-level metrics and logs         |

* * *

**At Level 3, you’ll alert on individual transactions and trace-based metrics.**