---
title: "Why Level 4? | Grafana Labs"
description: "When auto-instrumentation isn't enough"
---

> 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

> **“What’s happening in my application logic?”**

## Problems you can solve at Level 4

| Problem                                            | How Level 4 helps                     |
|----------------------------------------------------|---------------------------------------|
| “How many orders were placed this hour?”           | Custom application metrics            |
| “What’s our checkout conversion rate?”             | Application-specific counters         |
| “Why did this specific calculation fail?”          | Custom spans with application context |
| “What was in the user’s cart when they abandoned?” | Enriched trace attributes             |

## Who needs Level 4

Teams that need to answer questions auto-instrumentation can’t:

- Revenue impact of outages
- Feature-specific performance
- Application workflow bottlenecks