Application Observability host-hours pricing

From September 1, 2024, Grafana Cloud Application Observability requires you to send additional telemetry to capture the hosts that are sending observability signals to Grafana Cloud, so that it can calculate usage and billing. The change applies to every customer of Grafana Cloud that’s using Application Observability.

To use Application Observability beyond September 1, 2024, you need to send a traces_host_info metric via either Grafana Alloy or OpenTelemetry Collector.

For information about the pricing and billing for Application Observability, refer to these resources:

Definition of host

Hosts can be any of the following:

Physical Servers: Dedicated machines that run an operating system and applications.
Virtual Machines (VMs): Instances of operating systems running on virtualized environments, such as those managed by VMware, Hyper-V, or cloud providers like AWS EC2, Azure Virtual Machines, and so on.

What is not a host

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.

Grafana Kubernetes Monitoring

If you use Grafana Kubernetes Monitoring you need to update the Kubernetes monitoring agent configuration with one of the options:

Kubernetes monitoring wizard

Enable the Enable Application Observability for this cluster toggle.

Helm Chart

Set receivers.grafanaCloudMetrics to true in values.yaml.

Grafana Alloy

If you use Alloy to send relevant signals, enable the host_info connector in your Alloy deployment, for more information consult the Alloy OpenTelemetry component documentation.

Warning
It’s important to ensure you have wired up the connector in one of your pipelines.

otelcol.connector.host_info "default" {
  // https://grafana.com/docs/alloy/latest/reference/components/otelcol.connector.host_info/
  host_identifiers = ["host.name"]

  output {
    metrics = [otelcol.processor.batch.default.input]
  }
}

An example configuration that includes the connector is available from the Application Observability Alloy set up documentation.