Investigate service health and dashboards

Use service-level views when a symptom affects many customers or does not yet have a customer or Issue to start from.

Find the affected service

Open Explore → Overview for the current operational picture. Then use Services to compare request rate, error rate, and p95 latency. Open a service to inspect its RED metrics over time and to start an alert with that service preselected.

Use Service Map to see upstream and downstream dependencies from distributed traces. The map is incomplete when services do not propagate trace context or sampling removes the relevant calls; it is evidence from observed traces, not a configuration inventory.

Explain the symptom

1. Fix the project, environment, and time window.
2. Identify the service where rate, errors, or latency changed.
3. Open representative traces from that same window.
4. Follow the critical path and error spans into correlated logs.
5. When a customer or Issue appears, switch to that connected story for impact and replay evidence.

Metrics show where and when behavior changed. Traces and logs explain why.

Save a dashboard

Open Explore → Dashboards to create a custom dashboard for a question the team expects to ask again. Add and arrange widgets in the dashboard editor. Clone a dashboard when testing a materially different view; rename or delete it only after checking who relies on it.

Avoid dashboards that merely duplicate Customers, Issues, or a service detail page. Give each dashboard a question-oriented name such as “Checkout latency by environment,” and keep time and project assumptions visible.

• Search logs, traces, and metrics
• Create alerts