Understand your data
Telemetry signals are the data your systems generate to help you understand what’s happening inside your applications and infrastructure. Grafana Cloud supports four telemetry signals that work together to give you complete observability:
Each signal answers different questions about your system’s behavior. Metrics tell you something is wrong, logs provide the details of what happened, traces show you the path a request took, and profiles reveal where your code spends time.
Why telemetry signals matter
Modern applications are distributed across multiple services, containers, and infrastructure layers. When problems occur, you need visibility into every layer to find the root cause quickly.
Telemetry signals provide this visibility by capturing data at different levels of granularity:
- Metrics: give you the high-level view of system health and alert you when thresholds are breached.
- Logs: capture the specific events and error messages that explain what went wrong.
- Traces: connect the dots across services to show how a single request moved through your system.
- Profiles: pinpoint the exact functions or queries causing performance issues.
Without telemetry signals, you’re guessing at causes instead of following evidence to solutions.
Benefits of using signals together
The real power of telemetry comes from using all four signals together. Grafana Cloud lets you correlate signals so you can move seamlessly from one to another during an investigation.
When your signals share common labels like service and environment, you can click through from a latency spike in metrics to the specific slow trace, and then to the profile showing which function caused the delay.
