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Section 8 · Decision support

Situations where Grafana Cloud may not be the best choice for your organization.

Estimated time: 1 min

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.