Application Observability pricing
Application Observability bills on a combination of host hours and the telemetry your instrumented applications send. Host hours cover the product, and metrics, logs, traces, and profiles are billed separately at standard Grafana Cloud rates.
For current rates, refer to the pricing page.
How Application Observability is billed
Two charges apply:
- Host hours for each active host sending application telemetry.
- Telemetry for the metrics, logs, traces, and profiles that telemetry produces, at standard Metrics and Logs, Traces, and Profiles rates.
Host-hours pricing applies only if you use the Application Observability product. If you build your own dashboards, alerts, and workflows to monitor applications instead, standard pricing for Metrics, Logs, Traces, Profiles, and Visualization applies and there are no host-hour charges.
Definitions
Host: A physical or virtual operating system instance that sends observability signals, including traces and span metrics. Physical servers and virtual machines both count. A container isn’t a host: containers are isolated application environments running on a host system and don’t represent a full operating system instance.
Active: A host is active if it has sent observability signals in the last 15 minutes.
Billable host hours: The total number of host hours measured during the month.
How usage is calculated
Host hours are the number of active hosts multiplied by the hours each is active per day, multiplied by the days in the month.
Because billing follows actual host hours, you aren’t billed on peak host usage at the 99th percentile. You pay for the host hours you actually consumed during the billing month.
Telemetry costs vary with your actual metrics, logs, traces, and profiles consumption and are calculated the same way as telemetry from any other source.
Special considerations
Which pricing model applies to you
The host-hours model reached self-serve users on Pro and Advanced plans on September 1, 2024, and reaches contracted organizations on contract renewal.
A newer model took effect on February 13, 2026:
- Customers who started on or after February 13, 2026 pay for host hours plus telemetry, with no telemetry credits.
- Customers who started before February 13, 2026 pay a higher host-hour rate that includes telemetry credits. Standard pricing applies to usage beyond those credits.
Telemetry credits
Telemetry credits apply only if you started before February 13, 2026.
On that model you receive a credit of 1.5 active series and 0.02 GB of traces per host hour. For a host active for 720 hours in a month, that’s roughly 1,080 active series and 14.4 GB of traces. Most customers stay within the included amount. Above it, standard metrics and traces rates apply.
Serverless environments
In serverless environments, usage is billed on the telemetry ingested into Grafana Cloud rather than on host hours.
This is a non-exhaustive list of environments subject to telemetry-based billing:
Note
Contact Grafana Support if you rely on one of these technologies so we can validate that your environment is configured correctly. Use the subject “Enable Application Observability in a serverless environment”.
Hosts that aren’t identified
Application Observability identifies hosts from OpenTelemetry resource attributes on your telemetry. If a service’s telemetry carries none of the supported attributes, that service isn’t counted for host-hours billing and the product shows a configuration warning.
This means a collector misconfiguration changes what you’re billed. For the attributes involved and how to set them for your environment, refer to Application Observability host-hours pricing.
View your usage
- In your Grafana Cloud stack, go to Cost Management and Billing > Usage.
- Under Product Breakdown, select Application Observability.
