Introduction
Cost Management and Billing integrates with your Grafana Cloud environment to show costs across metrics, logs, traces, and more, helping you spot spending patterns, optimize costs, and stay in control of your budget.
With these insights, you can see exactly how much you are spending and what you are spending it on, identify who is responsible for specific costs, explore strategies to reduce your overall invoice, and prevent unexpected overages before they occur—empowering you to make smarter decisions about where to optimize.
Learn more about the fundamentals and available features that help you optimize your use of Cost Management and Billing.
Before you begin
Administrators have full access to all features within the Cost Management and Billing application.
For all other users, you must explicitly assign the appropriate permissions to enable access.
Refer to Manage access to Cost Management and Billing RBAC. For example, for read-only access to billing and usage data, grant the Billing and usage reader role.
How it works at a glance
Cost Management and Billing continuously tracks your organization’s observability usage and presents it in a way that’s easy to understand and act on.
Collects usage across all observability data types
Automatically gathers consumption data for metrics, logs, traces, profiles, and other observability signals in your Grafana Cloud environment, giving you a complete picture of how your organization uses resources.
Aggregates costs into dashboards
Translates usage into costs and displays them in clear dashboards. You can see your spend balance, contract burn-down, and usage trends over time, helping you understand where your budget is going.
Attributes costs to teams and projects Breaks down spending so you can see which team, project, or service is responsible for usage, improving accountability and making it easier to implement chargeback or showback models.
Alerts you when usage crosses a threshold Notifies you proactively when your usage patterns exceed defined limits, so you can respond quickly to spikes and prevent unexpected overages.
Generates invoices monthly Produces detailed billing invoices each month that reflect your actual usage. These invoices are available to view and download directly in the app, making financial reporting simple.
Your workflow
A typical workflow with Cost Management and Billing is as follows.
Monitor usage
Review dashboards that display your spend balance, usage breakdowns, and contract burn-down trends. These views help you understand how much of your budget you’ve consumed and how usage is evolving over time.
Attribute costs
Assign usage to teams, projects, or departments so you can identify which groups are responsible for costs. This step promotes accountability and enables chargeback or showback within your organization.
Set alerts
Configure usage alerts that trigger when spend or consumption exceeds thresholds. Proactive alerts help you detect anomalies or spikes early, so you can take corrective action before costs spiral.
Review invoices
Access and download monthly invoices directly within the app. These invoices provide detailed usage information and make it easier to reconcile payments and integrate with financial reporting.
Analyze spend
Use the insights surfaced by the app to identify inefficiencies—for example, unnecessary data retention or high-cost services—and take steps to lower costs. Over time, this helps you manage your observability budget more effectively.
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