---
title: Services
description: The Services inventory provides a quick, high-level overview of the health and general performance of all instrumented services. Active alerts for each...
url: https://docs-v3-preview.elastic.dev/elastic/docs-content/pull/7600/solutions/observability/apm/services
products:
  - APM
  - Elastic Cloud Serverless
  - Elastic Observability
applies_to:
  - Elastic Cloud Serverless: Generally available
  - Elastic Stack: Generally available
---

# Services
The **Services** inventory provides a quick, high-level overview of the health and general performance of all instrumented services.
<note>
  A service only appears in the **Services** inventory if it has sent transactions or spans within the selected time window. Services that send only logs are not listed. If a service is missing, verify that it is sending transaction or span data and that the selected time range includes recent activity.
</note>

Active alerts for each service are prominently displayed in the service inventory table. Clicking an active alert badge brings you to the [**Alerts**](https://docs-v3-preview.elastic.dev/elastic/docs-content/pull/7600/solutions/observability/apm/create-apm-rules-alerts) tab where you can learn more about the active alert and take action.
<applies-to>Elastic Stack: Planned</applies-to> <applies-to>Elastic Cloud Serverless: Generally available</applies-to> The **Anomalies** column shows each service's highest [machine learning](https://docs-v3-preview.elastic.dev/elastic/docs-content/pull/7600/solutions/observability/apm/machine-learning) anomaly score for the selected time range, replacing the previous health status. To use this feature, anomaly detection must be enabled.
<applies-to>Elastic Stack: Generally available since 9.4</applies-to> <applies-to>Elastic Cloud Serverless: Generally available</applies-to> SLOs for each service are also shown in the service inventory table. Use the **Actions** menu on any service row to act on the service directly, or the **Environment** selector to filter the inventory by environment.
<applies-to>Elastic Stack: Generally available from 9.0 to 9.3</applies-to> To help surface potential issues, services are sorted by their health status: **critical** → **warning** → **healthy** → **unknown**. Health status is powered by [machine learning](https://docs-v3-preview.elastic.dev/elastic/docs-content/pull/7600/solutions/observability/apm/machine-learning) and requires anomaly detection to be enabled.

## Service groups

<note>
  For Observability Serverless projects, the **Editor** role or higher is required to create and manage service groups. To learn more, refer to [Assign user roles and privileges](/elastic/docs-content/pull/7600/deploy-manage/users-roles/cloud-organization/user-roles#general-assign-user-roles).
</note>

<important>
  The Service grouping functionality is in beta and is subject to change. The design and code is less mature than official generally available features and is being provided as-is with no warranties.
</important>

Group services together to build meaningful views that remove noise, simplify investigations across services, and combine related alerts.
![Example view of service group in the Applications UI in Kibana](https://docs-v3-preview.elastic.dev/elastic/docs-content/pull/7600/solutions/images/observability-apm-service-group.png)

To create a service group:
1. To open **Service inventory**, find **Applications** in the main menu or use the [global search field](https://docs-v3-preview.elastic.dev/elastic/docs-content/pull/7600/explore-analyze/find-and-organize/find-apps-and-objects).
2. Switch to **Service groups**.
3. Click **Create group**.
4. Specify a name, color, and description.
5. Click **Select services**.
6. Specify a [Kibana Query Language (KQL)](https://docs-v3-preview.elastic.dev/elastic/docs-content/pull/7600/explore-analyze/query-filter/languages/kql) query to filter services by one or more of the following dimensions: `agent.name`, `service.name`, `service.language.name`, `service.environment`, `labels.<xyz>`. Services that match the query within the last 24 hours will be assigned to the group.


### Examples

Not sure where to get started? Here are some sample queries you can build from:
- **Group services by environment**: To group "production" services, use `service.environment : "production"`.
- **Group services by name**: To group all services that end in "beat", use `service.name : *beat`. This will match services named "Auditbeat", "Heartbeat", "Filebeat", and so on.