---
title: "Explore core platform components | Grafana Labs"
description: "Learn about the core services included in every Grafana Cloud stack."
---

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

# 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.

01. Open the main menu on the left side of the screen.
02. Click **Dashboards**.
03. 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.
04. Click **Alerts & IRM**.
05. 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
06. Click **Testing & synthetics**.
07. Here you find Synthetic Monitoring and k6 performance testing. These tools let you proactively validate availability and performance before users are affected.
08. Click **Drilldown**.
09. With Drilldown you can explore, filter, and investigate metrics, logs, traces, and profiles without knowing a query language.
10. Click **Explore**.
11. 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.
12. Click **AI & machine learning**.
13. 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.
14. Click **Adaptive Telemetry**.
15. Adaptive Telemetry 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.
16. Click **Cost Management and Billing**.
17. 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](/docs/grafana-cloud/introduction/).

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

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### More to explore (optional)

At this point in your path, you can explore the following topics:

- [Alerts and IRM](/docs/grafana-cloud/alerting-and-irm/)
- [Testing and synthetics](/docs/grafana-cloud/testing/)
- [Drilldown apps](/docs/grafana-cloud/visualizations/simplified-exploration/)
- [Explore](/docs/grafana-cloud/visualizations/explore/)
- [AI and machine learning](/docs/grafana-cloud/machine-learning/)
- [Adaptive Telemetry](/docs/grafana-cloud/adaptive-telemetry/)
- [Cost Management and Billing](/docs/grafana-cloud/cost-management-and-billing/)