Documentation Grafana Cloud Cost management and billing Understand your invoice Kubernetes Monitoring invoice

Understand your Grafana Cloud Kubernetes Monitoring invoice

Grafana Cloud calculates Kubernetes Monitoring usage based on the total number of host hours per month.

What is a host?

A host is any Kubernetes Node or container actively sending observability signals. Billable host hours are the total time that active hosts are monitored each month.

What qualifies as a host?

• Physical Servers: Dedicated machines that run an operating system and applications.
• Virtual Machines (VM): Instances of operating systems running as a virtual or emulated environment, such as those managed by VMware, Hyper-V, or cloud providers like AWS EC2, Azure Virtual Machines.
• Kubernetes Nodes: In containerized environments, a Kubernetes node (whether it is a virtual machine or a physical machine) qualifies as a host. These nodes run multiple Pods which themselves can have multiple containers but the nodes are considered the primary operating system instance.

What does not qualify as a host?

• Containers (for example, Docker containers): A container is an isolated application environment running on a host system. Containers, like those managed by Docker, are not considered hosts because they do not represent a full operating system instance. Instead, they share the OS kernel with other containers on the same host.
• Pods in Kubernetes: A Pod, which is a group of one or more containers, is not considered a host. Pods run within nodes, which are the actual hosts.

For more details, refer to Host-hours pricing for Kubernetes Monitoring.

What is a host hour?

Active host hours can be calculated by multiplying hosts by 720 (the number of hours in a 30-day month).

How are host hours tracked?

Grafana tracks active Kubernetes hosts based on the following data collected from kube-state-metrics:

• kube_node_info
• kube_pod_container_info
• kube_pod_info

Kubernetes Monitoring usage is billed during a calendar month at:

• $0.015 per active Node hour
• $0.001 per active container hour

A host is considered active if it has sent observability signals in the last 15 minutes. Billable hours are the sum of the time that active hosts send monitoring signals to Grafana Cloud during the month.

Credit for metrics active series

A credit of 1 billable series per Node hour and 0.10 billable series per container hour is applied to your invoice. This translates to ~720 metric series per host hour per month and ~72 series per container hour per month that is active for 720 hours in a month.

The majority of customers remain within this included usage in terms of telemetry ingestion on a per host hour and per container hour basis. For customers exceeding this included usage, standard pricing for metrics and traces applies.

For more details about metrics pricing, refer to Understand your Grafana Cloud Metrics invoice.

When does the host hour based pricing apply?

Host hours-based pricing applies whenever you send Kubernetes-related observability signals to Grafana Cloud using the kube-state-metrics add-on, whether you use Grafana Kubernetes Monitoring Helm Chart or another tool such as OTel Collector.

If you have been using Kubernetes Monitoring in Grafana Cloud prior to September 17th, 2024, billable usage for Kubernetes Monitoring is based on the underlying telemetry generated. Plans remain on the telemetry billing model unless you would like to migrate to the host-hours billing model. Contact the support team to request moving to the host- hours billing model.

View a usage summary

The Billing and Usage dashboard provides a usage summary for all Grafana Cloud services and billable data sources.

Usage details for Kubernetes Monitoring can be found on the panels titled Infrastructure Observability Host and Infrastructure Observability Container.

Find your invoice

You can view your invoice from your Cloud Portal.

To access your invoice:

1. Sign in to Grafana Cloud.
2. From the left navigation, select Billing > Invoices.
3. Select an invoice to view.

The most recent invoice is listed first, and you can view and download it as a PDF or CSV file.