---
title: "Decision framework | Grafana Labs"
description: "How to decide where to start your Grafana Cloud journey"
---

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

## The simple rule

> **Start at the lowest level you haven’t mastered, then move up.**

## Common starting points

| Your situation                                   | Start here                                                          |
|--------------------------------------------------|---------------------------------------------------------------------|
| New to observability                             | Level 1 — Integrations                                              |
| Have Prometheus but no tracing                   | Level 2 — Application Observability, Knowledge Graph, RCA Workbench |
| Have tracing but struggle to debug slow requests | Level 3 — Continuous profiling                                      |
| Need custom metrics for business KPIs            | Level 4 — OpenTelemetry custom instrumentation                      |

## Decision tree

[Decision tree for choosing your observability level based on current capabilities](grafana-cloud-decision-tree-1.svg "Decision tree for choosing your observability level based on current capabilities")