Grafana Cloud Migration Assistant: from self-hosted to the cloud in minutes

Moving your existing Grafana instance to Grafana Cloud just got dramatically simpler. 

Today, we’re excited to announce the general availability of the Grafana Cloud Migration Assistant, a powerful yet intuitive tool designed to streamline your migration journey.

Traditionally, migrating from Grafana OSS or Grafana Enterprise to Grafana Cloud required technical expertise with Grafana’s HTTP API or command-line tools like Grizzly. This manual process was often time-consuming and error-prone, especially for organizations with numerous dashboards and complex configurations. 

The Migration Assistant provides a user-friendly interface that guides you through migrating your resources in just a few clicks—no coding required. Key capabilities include:

• Automated resource migration: Take a snapshot of your dashboards, folders, and other resources and migrate them to Grafana Cloud in one operation.
• Secure data source migration: Transfer your data sources complete with encrypted credentials—no need to reconfigure connections.
• Intuitive user experience: Follow a clear, step-by-step process designed for users of all technical levels.
• Comprehensive results tracking: Easily view migration status for all resources, with clear indicators of successful transfers and any issues that require attention.

Why migrate to Grafana Cloud?

Organizations that move to Grafana Cloud enjoy significant advantages:

• Zero maintenance: Instant upgrades and automatic security patches free your team from operational overhead.
• Enterprise-grade scalability: Easily handle more than 1 billion active series with 13-month metrics retention and 30 days of logs and traces.
• Guaranteed reliability: 99.5% uptime SLA with automatic backups ensures your monitoring never fails when you need it most.
• Reduced total cost: Lower your overall expenses compared to self-managed deployments.
• Cloud-exclusive features: Access innovations only available in Grafana Cloud, including Kubernetes Monitoring, Adaptive Telemetry, Grafana Cloud IRM, and Grafana AI capabilities.

How to use the Grafana Migration Assistant

The free migration assistant, available in Grafana 12, helps you encrypt and securely migrate your resources to your specified Grafana Cloud instance within minutes. Simply follow these steps:

1. Create an account on Grafana Cloud to set up your cloud stack.
2. On your cloud stack, navigate to Home > Administration > General > Migrate to Grafana Cloud and generate a migration token.
3. Enter the migration token on your self-managed instance to connect it to the Grafana Cloud Stack.
4. Select your resources and build your snapshot.
5. Click Upload snapshot to copy the resources to the Grafana Cloud instance.

Get started today

Ready to make the move from self-hosted Grafana to Grafana Cloud? Try the Grafana Cloud Migration Assistant and experience a smoother, faster, and more secure migration process. Visit our migration guide to get started and take advantage of the powerful features Grafana Cloud has to offer.

Grafana Cloud is the easiest way to get started with metrics, logs, traces, dashboards, and more. We have a generous forever-free tier and plans for every use case. Sign up for free now!