---
title: "Operational practices overview | Grafana Labs"
description: "Cross-cutting capabilities that span all levels"
---

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

## Why a separate section?

Some capabilities don’t fit neatly into the hierarchy. They **span all four levels**:

| Practice                | How it spans levels                                                                    |
|-------------------------|----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------|
| **Alerting**            | Alert on infrastructure (L1), services (L2), transactions (L3), or custom metrics (L4) |
| **Proactive testing**   | Test infrastructure uptime (L1), service endpoints (L2), or user journeys (L3)         |
| **Platform management** | Govern access, costs, and scale across all levels                                      |
| **Grafana Assistant**   | Query, troubleshoot, and build dashboards using natural language at any level          |

## The three operational areas (plus an AI accelerator)

[Three cross-cutting operational areas: Alerting and IRM, Proactive Testing, Platform Management](grafana-cloud-operational-areas-1.svg "Three cross-cutting operational areas: Alerting and IRM, Proactive Testing, Platform Management")

## When to focus on operations

| If you’re at… | Operational priority                       |
|---------------|--------------------------------------------|
| Level 1       | Basic alerting on infrastructure metrics   |
| Level 2       | Service-level alerting, SLOs               |
| Level 3       | Synthetic tests for critical user journeys |
| Level 4       | Custom metric alerting, cost optimization  |