GEM hardware requirements
This page outlines the current hardware requirements for running Grafana Enterprise Metrics (GEM). Grafana Labs reserves the right to mark a support issue as ‘unresolvable’ if these requirements are not followed. See the Grafana Labs Enterprise Support SLA for more details.
Note
As of February 2025, you must run GEM on the managed Kubernetes services offered by AWS (Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service), GCP (Google Kubernetes Engine), or Azure (Azure Kubernetes Service). Additionally, you must use the managed object storage services offered by AWS (S3), GCP (GCS), or Azure (Blob Storage).
No other deployment modes are supported.
Here are more details on the hardware and object storage requirements for CPU, memory, and disk for managed Kubernetes clusters.
CPU and memory
You should deploy GEM on machines with a 1:4 ratio of CPU to memory, meaning that for every CPU core, there should be 4GB of memory. Grafana Labs recommends deploying GEM onto machines with 16 CPU cores and 64GB of memory. All nodes in the Kubernetes cluster running GEM should be of the same type.
Disk
Various components of GEM, including the ingester and Alertmanager, require fast and persistent, local disk resources to be available to the host machine. For example, in the case of the ingester component, all incoming data is sent to a write-ahead log (WAL) to help withstand unexpected node termination. Additionally, a large amount of data is flushed to disk every 2 hours, by default, in preparation for uploading it to long-term object storage. The supported configurations for AWS, GCP, and Azure are as follows:
Amazon Web Services (AWS)
GEM is tested to run with io1 Provisioned IOPS SSD EBS volumes. The io1 storage must be provisioned at 50 IOPS per gigabyte, with a minimum of 150Gi allocated to ensure performant I/O.
Google Cloud Platform (GCP)
GEM is tested to run with pd-ssd SSD persistent disks.
Microsoft Azure
GEM is tested to run with Premium SSD SSD persistent disks.
Network
All components of GEM require fast network access. Nodes the software runs on should be connected by 10 gigabit/second or faster network connection speed.
Object storage
GEM requires object storage for configuration storage, as well as long-term data storage. AWS S3, GCP GCS, and Azure Blob storage are the only supported object stores for running GEM.
Amazon Web Services (AWS)
GEM is tested to run with AWS’s S3 object storage service using the Standard storage class.
Google Cloud Platform (GCP)
GEM is tested to run with GCP’s GCS object storage service using the STANDARD storage class in both regional and dual regional storage locations.
Microsoft Azure
GEM is tested to run Azure’s Blob Storage object storage service using the Standard storage class with replication type LRS.
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