Grafana Cloud

Introduction

Grafana Application Observability is an observability solution designed to minimize the mean time to repair (MTTR) for modern application problems based on OpenTelemetry semantic conventions and the Prometheus data-model.

New and existing Grafana Cloud users can use Application Observability to get started with observability in minutes by using OpenTelemetry instrumentation and export data to Grafana Cloud or augment their current experience by enabling Application Observability on top of existing Cloud Traces usage.

Get started

Follow the quickstart setup documentation to get started with Application Observability for a local development setup.

Alternatively, consult the full setup documentation for production use cases.

Pricing

Application Observability uses a host-hours-based pricing method to calculate usage costs. For a breakdown on host-hours-based pricing, refer to the Grafana Cloud pricing.

A hosts is a physical or virtual operating system instance.

Grafana measures the average number of active hosts that send observability signals including traces and span metrics. A host is active if it has sent observability signals in the last 15 minutes.

Billable hosts is the average number of active hosts measured during the month.

From the June 1, 2024 Application Observability is migrating accounts on a rolling-basis to a host-based pricing model. To be ready for this change, consult the documentation and update your instrumentation to send the required data. If the required data isn’t sent Application Observability has reduced functionality.

Why use Application Observability?

Application Observability helps Site Reliability Engineers (SREs) and Developers to reduce the time it takes to:

detect anomalies in services and applications
identify the root cause of the problem
fix the problem

Application Observability helps users with:

Data Collection: open standards and lock-in free instrumentation with OpenTelemetry to collect metrics, traces, and logs.
Anomaly Detection: pre-configured dashboards that help you to detect anomalies in your services and applications.
Root Cause Analysis: pre-configured dashboards that help you to identify the root cause of the problem.