Slide 3 of 4

What Level 4 provides

What you get

CapabilityDescription
Custom metricsApplication-specific KPIs as Prometheus metrics
Custom spansTrace data for your application operations
Enriched attributesContext on traces (user ID, order value, feature flags)
Richer dashboardsYour custom data in standard Grafana dashboards

The shift from Level 3

Level 3Level 4
“This request was slow”“This $500 order from a VIP customer was slow”
Generic trace dataApplication-enriched traces
Infrastructure metricsCustom application metrics

Same tools, richer data. You still use Grafana alerting, SLOs, and dashboards. The difference is the data: custom metrics you defined, traces enriched with application context.

Script

So what does Level 4 actually give you? Three things.

First, custom metrics. Application KPIs exposed as Prometheus metrics. Orders per hour, conversion rates, revenue in the last 15 minutes. Numbers that matter to your application, not just to infrastructure operations.

Second, custom spans. You add tracing to the specific operations that matter: checkout flow, payment processing, inventory checks. Now you can see exactly how long your application logic takes.

Third, enriched attributes. You add application context to your traces: user tier, order value, feature flags. This changes everything.

Instead of “this request was slow,” you can say “this 500 dollar order from a VIP customer was slow.”

Now stakeholders understand the impact. Now you can prioritize based on revenue, not just latency.

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