The four levels at a glance
| Level | Key question | Primary tool | Deep dive course |
|---|---|---|---|
| Level 1 | “Is my infrastructure healthy?” | Integrations, Cloud Provider Olly, DB Olly, K8s Monitoring | Integrations, Data Sources, CP Olly, DB Olly, Fleet Management, Send Data |
| Level 2 | “Which service is the problem?” | Application Observability (Service Inventory, RED) | App Olly (coming soon) |
| Level 3 | “Why is this request slow?” | Traces, Profiling, Frontend Olly | Tracing, Profiling (coming soon) |
| Level 4 | “What’s in my application logic?” | OpenTelemetry SDKs, Custom Metrics | Custom Instrumentation (coming soon) |
Operational practices (cross-cutting)
| Practice | Primary tools | When to focus |
|---|---|---|
| Alerting and IRM | Alerting, SLOs, OnCall, Incident | Once you have data at any level |
| Proactive testing | Synthetic Monitoring, k6 | After Level 1 is stable |
| Platform management | Adaptive Telemetry, RBAC, SSO | When scaling across teams |
| Grafana Assistant | Natural language queries, troubleshooting | Available at any level |
Script
This slide is your cheat sheet. Bookmark it, screenshot it, print it. Whatever works for you.
Level 1: Is my infrastructure healthy? Use Integrations, Cloud Provider Observability, Database Observability, Kubernetes Monitoring.
Level 2: Which service is the problem? Use Application Observability with Service Inventory and RED metrics.
Level 3: Why is this request slow? Use Distributed Traces, Continuous Profiling, and Frontend Observability.
Level 4: What’s happening in my application logic? Use OpenTelemetry SDKs and custom metrics.
Operational practices (alerting, proactive testing, platform management) span all levels. Start using them as soon as you have data. And Grafana Assistant is available at any level to help you query data, troubleshoot issues, and build dashboards using natural language.
And remember the key insight: each level provides context for the next. While you can jump ahead if needed, building the foundation first helps you get the most value from advanced capabilities.