DocumentationGrafana CloudMonitor applicationsApplication ObservabilityHost-hours pricing

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:

• Grafana Cloud Pricing for Application Observability
• Understand your Application Observability Invoice

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.

river Copy

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.

OpenTelemetry Collector

If you use an OpenTelemetry Collector to send signals to Grafana Cloud, you need to enable the grafanacloud connector in your collector.

An example configuration that has the grafanacloud connector enabled is available in the Application Observability OpenTelemetry Collector set up documentation.