---
title: "What's Grafana Cloud? | Grafana Labs"
description: "Grafana Cloud is a fully managed observability platform built on open source and open standards. It adds managed backends, AI tooling, and enterprise controls on top of Grafana OSS."
---

> For a curated documentation index, see [llms.txt](/llms.txt). For the complete documentation index, see [llms-full.txt](/llms-full.txt).

## OSS compared with Grafana Cloud

Open source Grafana is the visualization and query layer. You host it, point it at data wherever it lives, and operate the backends, scaling, and upgrades yourself.

Grafana Cloud runs that same foundation as a **managed service** and adds capabilities that only work as a service.

| Capability                                         | Grafana OSS (self-hosted)   | Grafana Cloud (managed)                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                       |
|----------------------------------------------------|-----------------------------|---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------|
| Dashboards, Explore, and visualizations            | Yes                         | Yes                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           |
| Alerting with notifiers, annotations, variables    | Yes                         | Yes                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           |
| Data source plugins and provisioning               | Yes                         | Yes                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           |
| Storage backends (metrics, logs, traces, profiles) | You deploy and operate them | Fully managed and hosted                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                      |
| Scaling, upgrades, and reliability                 | Your responsibility         | Handled for you, backed by a [99.5% uptime SLA](/legal/grafana-cloud-sla/)                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                    |
| Telemetry collection at scale                      | Manual setup                | [Fleet Management](/docs/grafana-cloud/send-data/fleet-management/), [hosted OTLP](/docs/grafana-cloud/send-data/otlp/), [Adaptive Telemetry](/docs/grafana-cloud/adaptive-telemetry/)                                                                                                                                                                        |
| Private connectivity                               | Not included                | PrivateLink and [Private Data Source Connect](/docs/grafana-cloud/connect-externally-hosted/private-data-source-connect/)                                                                                                                                                                                                                                     |
| Turnkey solutions                                  | Not included                | [Kubernetes Monitoring](/docs/grafana-cloud/monitor-infrastructure/kubernetes-monitoring/), [Application](/docs/grafana-cloud/monitor-applications/application-observability/), [Frontend](/docs/grafana-cloud/monitor-applications/frontend-observability/), [Database observability](/docs/grafana-cloud/monitor-applications/database-observability/)      |
| Reliability and response                           | Core alerting only          | [SLOs](/docs/grafana-cloud/alerting-and-irm/slo/) and [Grafana IRM](/docs/grafana-cloud/alerting-and-irm/irm/)                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                |
| AI and machine learning                            | Grafana Assistant only      | [Grafana Assistant](/docs/grafana-cloud/machine-learning/assistant/) with [infrastructure memory](/docs/grafana-cloud/machine-learning/assistant/guides/infrastructure-memory/), [forecasts](/docs/plugins/grafana-ml-app/latest/dynamic-alerting/forecasting/), [outlier detection](/docs/plugins/grafana-ml-app/latest/dynamic-alerting/outlier-detection/) |
| Access control and account management              | Basic permissions           | Full [RBAC](/docs/grafana/latest/administration/roles-and-permissions/access-control/), [access policies](/docs/grafana-cloud/security-and-account-management/authentication-and-permissions/access-policies/)                                                                                                                                                |

## Additional resources

If you aren’t on Grafana Cloud, you can explore for free.

Learn more about:

- [Grafana Cloud paid plans](/pricing/) on our website
- [Grafana Cloud documentation](/docs/grafana-cloud/)
- [What’s new in Grafana Cloud](/whats-new/)

[Start free](/auth/sign-up/create-user)