---
title: "Meeting the operational challenge | Grafana Labs"
description: "Grafana Cloud is built to do the heavy lifting, going beyond what you can perform in Grafana OSS."
---

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

## Cut the cost of running your own stack

Running a self-managed stack is real engineering work, separate from using the data:

- Capacity planning, patching, upgrades, and on-call for the observability backend itself
- Security reviews and version maintenance
- Engineering hours that don’t show up on any vendor invoice

With Grafana Cloud, you can manage these operational challenges:

- **Cardinality**: Every new service and label combination adds unique metric series, and high cardinality (metrics with many unique label combinations) drives memory and cost.
  
  - The Cloud Metrics database is built for high-cardinality workloads, no need to resize and tune the backend to keep up.
  - [Adaptive Metrics](/docs/grafana-cloud/adaptive-telemetry/adaptive-metrics/) automatically combines any series that is not used by dashboards, alerts, or queries.
- **Ingestion volume**: Logs and traces arrive faster as traffic rises. The built-in databases Grafana Cloud Logs and Grafana Cloud Traces can scale without you performing capacity planning.
- **Sharding and scaling**: Backend databases run as distributed systems that need sharding (splitting data across nodes), capacity planning, and careful upgrades.

## Real results from real teams

- [**SailPoint**](/success/sailpoint)
  
  > “When we crunched the numbers, Grafana Labs was offering to run everything for cheaper, and it would reduce the load on our engineering team. That was our ‘a-ha’ moment. We spent a lot of time managing Grafana internally. Now we have more time to innovate.”
- [**Paradigm**](/blog/why-paradigm-switched-to-grafana-cloud-inside-their-observability-stack/)
  
  > “We could have hosted Loki internally, which is the beautiful thing about Grafana’s open source tooling. But we chose Grafana Cloud because we’re a small company and a small team, so we didn’t want to manage it ourselves. The engineering costs of hosting it ourselves would be much higher.”
- [**Mux**](/blog/how-mux-cut-metrics-volume-by-60-increased-retention-times-and-improved-developer-productivity-with-grafana-cloud/)
  
  > “Grafana Cloud probably saves us hundreds of engineering hours a year. Our platform engineers don’t have to manage the stack any more, and our product engineers don’t have to work through multiple observability tools.”
- [**Hona**](/success/hona/)
  
  > “We considered self-hosting the open source version, but when we calculated the engineering time for setup and maintenance versus Grafana Cloud, Grafana Cloud made much more sense.”