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 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
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”