---
title: "Operational practices overview | Grafana Labs"
description: "Introduction to cross-cutting capabilities"
---

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

## Operational practices

**What you learned in Module 5:**

- Custom instrumentation goes beyond auto-instrumentation.
- Add application-specific metrics, spans, and context.
- Answer questions auto-instrumentation can’t address.

* * *

**What you’ll do in this module:**

You’ll explore cross-cutting operational capabilities:

- **Why a separate section** — Capabilities that span all four levels
- **Alerting and IRM** — Detecting and responding to problems
- **Grafana Assistant** — AI-powered observability acceleration
- **Proactive testing** — Finding problems before users do
- **Platform management** — Governing observability at scale

**Estimated time:** 10 minutes