# Get started with Nais APM

This tutorial takes you from zero to reading your service's health, issues, and
traces in Nais APM. You don't install anything — if your app runs on Nais and
produces telemetry, it's already there.

## Prerequisites

- A Nais application deployed to a cluster.
- Access to your team's Grafana.

## 1. Find your service

Open the [Nais APM service inventory](https://grafana.nav.cloud.nais.io/a/nais-apm-app/services).
You get a searchable list of every service the platform sees telemetry for.
Search is fuzzy, so a partial name is enough.

Click your service to open its detail page. The tabs across the top follow the
path from symptom to cause:

`Overview · Issues · Alerts · Backend · Frontend · Database · Dependencies · Traces · Logs · (Profiling)`

![Nais APM service inventory — searchable list with per-service health sparklines](/assets/nais-apm-service-list.png)

**Overview, Alerts, Backend, Frontend, and Database are always there** — if
there's no data yet, they show an empty/setup state instead of disappearing.
**Issues, Traces, Logs, Dependencies, and Profiling** appear only when the
capability behind them is present: Issues/Traces/Logs need Loki and Tempo,
Dependencies needs the service graph, and Profiling shows up only for teams that
have a profiling datasource — most won't.

## 2. Read the health overview

The **Overview** tab opens with a health header: the RED signals as big numbers.

- **Rate** — requests per second.
- **Errors** — error ratio.
- **Duration** — latency.

Each number carries a **delta against the previous period** — for example, a
red arrow if errors are up versus the same window before it. This is the
"is this OK right now?" answer without reading a chart. Below the header, an
attention section calls out degraded operations and dependencies, and deploy
markers on the charts show which release moved the line.

Custom application metrics, if your app exposes any, are collapsed at the bottom
of Overview so they don't crowd the health signal.

![Overview tab — RED big numbers with period deltas and the error-budget panel](/assets/nais-apm-service-navno-overview.png)

## 3. Check the Issues tab

The **Issues** tab is the errors list — browser and backend errors side by
side, each grouped into a single **issue**. By default it shows unresolved
issues, sorted so anything **Regressed** (resolved before, happening again)
floats to the top.

Click a row to open the **issue drawer**: the stack trace with your own code
highlighted, impact (how many users, which versions, which endpoints), and a
link to a representative trace. From here you can resolve, ignore, or assign the
issue — see [Triage an issue](/observability/apm/how-to/triage-an-issue.md).

Below the list, the **Versions** panel answers "did this start with today's
release?" and the **Sessions** panel lets you search by user or session.

![Issues tab — exceptions grouped by fingerprint](/assets/nais-apm-service-navno-issues.png)

![Issue drawer — triage bar and stack trace](/assets/nais-apm-service-navno-issues-drawer.png)

## 4. Look at Backend, Database, and Frontend

- **Backend** — RED metrics per operation at the top (which HTTP route is slow
  or erroring), and process/runtime internals (JVM heap, threads, and similar)
  below, collapsed by default. These used to be two separate **Endpoints** and
  **Runtime** tabs; they're now one place. Old `tab=server` and `tab=runtime`
  links still open here.
- **Database** — query analytics (rate, errors, latency per operation) built
  from your database spans, plus connection-pool health. If it's empty, your app
  may need [database instrumentation](/observability/apm/how-to/database-queries.md).
- **Frontend** — Core Web Vitals, pageloads, sessions, per-page performance,
  and a browser breakdown, plus web-vitals attribution (what's driving LCP, INP,
  and CLS). This tab lights up for apps using [Grafana Faro](/observability/frontend.md)
  or [`@nais/apm`](/observability/apm/tutorials/track-frontend-errors.md).

![Database tab — PostgreSQL query analytics and connection-pool health](/assets/nais-apm-service-fpsoknad-database-pg.png)

![Database tab empty state — the instrumentation checklist](/assets/nais-apm-service-navno-database-empty.png)

## 5. Drill into Traces and Logs

- **Traces** — search your service's traces. **Trace breakdowns** group latency
  and errors by attribute, so you can see which tag explains the p99.
- **Logs** — search structured logs. **Log patterns** collapse thousands of log
  lines into a handful of templates so you can spot a new error pattern during
  an incident — see [Use log patterns during an incident](/observability/apm/how-to/log-patterns.md).

Both tabs open with the breakdown (Traces) or patterns (Logs) panel collapsed
above the list — expand it when you want to slice the data, or work straight
from the list below.

![Traces tab — span-name breakdowns above the trace list](/assets/nais-apm-service-fpsoknad-traces.png)

![Logs tab — top error patterns above the raw log stream](/assets/nais-apm-service-navno-logs.png)

## 6. Use the shared time picker

The time picker in the page header controls **every** tab at once. When you
narrow it to the minutes around an incident, the health header, issues, traces,
and logs all follow. The range lives in the URL (`from`/`to`), so a link you
copy opens on exactly the window you were looking at.

## Next steps

- Add error tracking to a browser app: [Track frontend errors with `@nais/apm`](/observability/apm/tutorials/track-frontend-errors.md).
- Get notified when things break: [Create alerts from templates](/observability/apm/how-to/create-alerts.md).
- Understand the machinery: [How Nais APM works](/observability/apm/explanations/how-nais-apm-works.md).