Quickstart: Onboard in 30 Minutes

Quickstart: Onboard in 30 Minutes

Purpose

Get a service emitting metrics, logs, and traces to Grafana Cloud in 30 minutes.

Before you start

• Your service runs in AKS (or has an Alloy collection path).
• You can deploy via Helm.
• You have a glc_-prefixed Grafana Cloud access-policy token (not a glsa_ service-account token).

The 30-minute path

1. Pick your signals (5 min) — decide what metrics/logs/traces matter. See Signal Catalog.
2. Instrument with OTel (10 min) — add the OpenTelemetry SDK/auto-instrumentation. See the Metrics / Logs / Traces guides.
3. Apply the label schema (5 min) — service.name, env, cluster, team. See Naming & Label Schema.
4. Deploy the collector (5 min) — Helm values snippet routing to the OTLP endpoint via Alloy.
5. Verify (5 min) — confirm data lands in Mimir/Loki/Tempo; import the starter dashboard.

Verify it worked

# confirm series are arriving (replace with your service.name)
# query Mimir via Grafana Explore: count(up{service_name="my-service"})

[stub: quickstart-verify-commands] — fill this in. Greppable doc-debt marker.

Next steps

• Register in the Service Catalog.
• Define your first SLO: SLO Registry.
• Complete the Onboarding Checklist.