What self-hosting means
When you run Grafana OSS or Grafana Enterprise, you’re self-hosting: you install, configure, and maintain the software on your own infrastructure. It’s a fully capable, production-ready way to run Grafana that gives you complete control over your environment.
What you consider here is the operational work you take on:
- Infrastructure: servers, operating system, networking
- Database: MySQL or PostgreSQL for production, including backups (SQLite is for development only)
- Upgrades: planning and executing every version upgrade
- Security: OS patches, access controls, network security
- High availability (HA): running multiple copies so the system stays up if one fails
The hidden cost is engineering time
These line items are more than infrastructure spend. The larger, easily overlooked cost is the engineering time spent running observability instead of building products. As usage grows, that operational work competes with the projects your team would rather focus on.
How the work scales
What you need grows with the number of people you serve:
Fully managed options, including Amazon Managed Grafana, Azure Managed Grafana, and Grafana Cloud, take on this operational work for you, so you get the benefits of Grafana without the operational burden.