---
title: "What problems does Level 3 solve? | Grafana Labs"
description: "Understanding transaction insights"
---

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

## The key question

> **“Why is this specific request slow?”**

Level 3 lets you zoom in from service averages into individual requests, then into the specific code causing the problem.

[Level 3 zoom in progression showing the journey from service view to request trace to code-level root cause](/docs/learning-hub/intro-to-grafana-cloud/images/level-3-zoom-progression.svg "Level 3 zoom in progression showing the journey from service view to request trace to code-level root cause")

## Problems you can solve at Level 3

| Problem                                      | How Level 3 helps                             |
|----------------------------------------------|-----------------------------------------------|
| “This one user’s request failed, why?”       | Distributed trace shows the full request path |
| “Which database query is causing latency?”   | Trace spans reveal slow operations            |
| “Where is time being spent in this request?” | Flame graphs show CPU/memory hotspots         |
| “What did this user actually experience?”    | Frontend traces capture real user sessions    |

## What you get

- **Distributed traces**: Follow a request across every service it touches
- **Span details**: See exactly what happened at each step
- **Trace-to-logs**: Jump from a trace span to the relevant log lines
- **Continuous profiling**: Code-level CPU/memory analysis
- **Frontend observability**: Real user session replay

> **Precision is the difference.** Moving from “the service is slow” to “this specific database query returned too many rows” separates good observability from great observability.