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Section 1 · Which Grafana?

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.

Estimated time: 1 min

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.

CapabilityGrafana OSS (self-hosted)Grafana Cloud (managed)
Dashboards, Explore, and visualizationsYesYes
Alerting with notifiers, annotations, variablesYesYes
Data source plugins and provisioningYesYes
Storage backends (metrics, logs, traces, profiles)You deploy and operate themFully managed and hosted
Scaling, upgrades, and reliabilityYour responsibilityHandled for you, backed by a 99.5% uptime SLA
Telemetry collection at scaleManual setupFleet Management, hosted OTLP, Adaptive Telemetry
Private connectivityNot includedPrivateLink and Private Data Source Connect
Turnkey solutionsNot includedKubernetes Monitoring, Application, Frontend, Database observability
Reliability and responseCore alerting onlySLOs and Grafana IRM
AI and machine learningGrafana Assistant onlyGrafana Assistant with infrastructure memory, forecasts, outlier detection
Access control and account managementBasic permissionsFull RBAC, access policies

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