Explore core platform components

In addition to managed observability databases, every Grafana Cloud stack includes a set of core services. These components work together so you can monitor your systems, respond to issues, and validate reliability from a single platform.

To explore the core platform components, complete the following steps:

1. Open the main menu on the left side of the screen.

2. Click Dashboards. This is where you build and view visualizations for data you have sent to Grafana Cloud or connected from external sources. Notice there are a few prebuilt dashboards available.

3. Click Alerts & IRM. Here you can see the options for:

   • Alerting to create and view alert rules, contact points, and notification policies
   • Service center, a unified view of your services with operational context attached
   • IRM, for on-call schedules, escalation policies, and incident coordination
   • SLO, to create Service Level Objectives
   • Labels, to create and manage labels for alerts, incidents, and SLOs

4. Click Testing & synthetics to find Synthetic Monitoring and k6 performance testing. These tools let you proactively validate availability and performance before users are affected.

5. Click Drilldown. With Drilldown you can explore, filter, and investigate metrics, logs, traces, and profiles without knowing a query language.

6. Click Explore. Explore lets you write and run queries directly against any connected data source. Unlike Drilldown, you need to know a query language such as PromQL or LogQL to use it.

7. Click AI & machine learning. These built-in tools let you:

   • Forecast and detect anomalies
   • Detect outliers
   • Run automatic investigations to find unusual system activity

   These tools are also available as part of some observability solutions, including Kubernetes Monitoring.

8. Click Adaptive Telemetry. This helps you control costs by identifying data you’re not using and filtering out low-value data. It works across metrics, logs, traces, and profiles so you only pay for the data that matters.

9. Click Cost Management and Billing. Here you monitor how much you’re using and spending, view invoices, and set up alerts that notify you when usage or costs approach a defined limit.

For a full overview of every capability covered in this milestone and more, refer to the Introduction to Grafana Cloud.

In the next milestone, you explore dashboard options for visualizing your data.