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Section 2 · Connect tools under one big tent

Why Grafana Cloud's open-standards foundation prevents vendor lock-in.

Estimated time: 1 min

Vendor lock-in

With many observability vendors, moving away means starting from scratch:

  • Dashboards stored in proprietary formats
  • Queries written in vendor-specific languages
  • Data locked behind APIs you don’t control

The difference with Grafana Cloud

Built on open-source and open-standard foundations, any switching is a migration, not a rewrite. Your dashboards, alert rules, and instrumentation move with you, because they’re built on open formats, not locked to our platform.

  • Dashboard formats: Cloud uses the same dashboards and alert rules as open source Grafana.
  • Query languages: Cloud uses the open query languages of Prometheus, Loki, and Tempo: PromQL, LogQL, and TraceQL.
  • Standard APIs: Cloud exposes open APIs (Prometheus remote write, OTLP, and others) so your tooling isn’t tied to a proprietary integration layer.

Real results from real teams

  • Erste Digital

    “We wanted to have a vendor neutral instrumentation and therefore we chose Grafana Cloud.”

  • Optro

    Grafana Cloud’s native support for OpenTelemetry would allow the team to future-proof their stack. Open standards offered greater flexibility around data collection and integration.