When to look elsewhere
If any of these situations apply to you, consider these suggestions.
Your data must stay in a country or region where Grafana Cloud isn’t available:
Look at self-managed Grafana instead. The hosted version may not be the right fit yet.
You only need one signal, like metrics, at a small scale:
Self-managed Grafana and Prometheus is probably enough. Cloud pays off most when operating the backend, scaling, or controlling cost starts to take real time and money.
You’re already on another platform and it’s working fine:
No reason to switch. Revisit if the pricing changes, the roadmap diverges, or you start feeling locked in.
Your compliance rules require you to own and operate all your own infrastructure:
Self-managed Grafana is the right answer. Hosted Cloud isn’t a fit. If your requirements are about data control rather than fully self-operating, the federal cloud option runs in your own cloud account and may bridge the gap.
Your incident management is deeply built into another tool and you’re not looking to change it:
Keep what you have. Grafana Cloud’s alerting and reliability features can still feed into your existing tool.