You might be using Grafana, but not Grafana Cloud
You could be thinking, “I already use Grafana, so I must be on Grafana Cloud.” Confusion happens when:
- You aren’t sure whether your Grafana comes from Grafana Labs or from your cloud provider.
- A feature you saw in Grafana Cloud documentation is missing from your setup, and it isn’t clear why.
- You’re unsure which product the docs, pricing info, or emails are talking about.
What’s Grafana Cloud?
This journey covers Grafana Cloud, its features and value. Grafana Cloud is:
- A managed observability platform built on the solid foundation of Grafana OSS
- The next step when teams scale past what a self-managed setup can deliver without significant operational overhead
Grafana Cloud is open by design:
- Open source: The same databases and query languages (PromQL, LogQL, TraceQL), run as a managed service.
- Open standards: Prometheus and OpenTelemetry are first-class. Your existing investments carry over.
- Open ecosystem: 100+ data sources and 50+ curated integrations for sending data from what you already have.
- No lock-in: Dashboards, alert rules, and telemetry use open formats. Leaving is a migration, not a rewrite.