Which Grafana? on Grafana Labs

Which Grafana?

Wed, 17 Jun 2026 12:54:46 -0500

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.

You might be using Grafana, but not Grafana Cloud

Wed, 17 Jun 2026 12:54:46 -0500

Concerns

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, or emails are talking about.

Ways to use Grafana

Several products carry the Grafana name. They differ by who manages them:

Product	Management	Description
Grafana OSS	Installed and managed by you	The open source visualization and monitoring tool
Grafana Enterprise	Installed and managed by you	The same open source tool as Grafana OSS, plus paid features such as support, single sign-on, and access controls
Amazon Managed Grafana and Azure Managed Grafana	Your cloud provider	A managed Grafana OSS or Enterprise that your cloud provider builds and operates
Grafana Cloud	Grafana Labs builds and runs	Fully managed observability platform. You may pay through a managed service or through Grafana.

How to tell which one you have

Where you log in: A login through your cloud provider’s console, such as AWS or Azure, points to a provider-managed Grafana. A login through Grafana Labs points to Grafana Cloud.
Who you have an account with: A managed Grafana on a cloud platform is part of that provider’s account. Grafana Cloud is an account with Grafana Labs.
Which docs match your screens: If Grafana Cloud documentation doesn’t match what you see, you’re probably on a different product.

What's Grafana Cloud?

Wed, 17 Jun 2026 12:54:46 -0500

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
Telemetry collection at scale	Manual setup	Fleet Management, hosted OTLP, Adaptive Telemetry
Private connectivity	Not included	PrivateLink and Private Data Source Connect
Turnkey solutions	Not included	Kubernetes Monitoring, Application, Frontend, Database observability
Reliability and response	Core alerting only	SLOs and Grafana IRM
AI and machine learning	Grafana Assistant only	Grafana Assistant with infrastructure memory, forecasts, outlier detection
Access control and account management	Basic permissions	Full RBAC, access policies

Additional resources

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

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