Slide 5 of 8

What this journey covers

Journey scope

This journey covers metrics and logs (not traces).

TelemetryCovered?LevelWhy
MetricsYesLevel 1Infrastructure health and performance
LogsYesLevel 1System events and errors
TracesNoLevel 3Request flow through services (future journey)

Why no traces?

Traces answer Level 3 questions like “Why is this specific request slow?” That requires understanding distributed tracing, span context, and service dependencies, which is a different skill set that will be covered in future courses.

Looking for traces? Sending traces to Grafana Cloud will be covered in a future Level 3 journey on distributed tracing.

Script

Before we go further, let’s be clear about what this journey covers and what it doesn’t.

This journey focuses on metrics and logs. These are the telemetry types that give you Level 1 infrastructure visibility. Is my server healthy? What’s happening in my system logs? Are my resources running out? Metrics and logs answer these questions.

You might notice we don’t cover traces. That’s intentional. Traces are about understanding request flow through your services. That’s Level 3, transaction insights. Distributed tracing is a different skill set with different tools and different questions. We’ll have a separate journey for that.

So if you’re here to send metrics and logs from your existing collectors (Prometheus, InfluxDB, Graphite, OpenTelemetry), you’re in the right place. If you’re looking to send traces, that’s coming in a future journey focused on Level 3 observability.

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