---
title: "Grafana Cloud | Grafana Labs"
description: "What the fully managed observability platform provides"
---

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

## What Grafana Cloud provides

Grafana Cloud is a fully managed service with capabilities beyond what self-hosted Grafana offers.

Grafana Labs runs the backend storage and processing for your metrics, logs, traces, and profiles. You send data in. Grafana Cloud handles scale, retention, and availability.

## Capabilities exclusive to Grafana Cloud

Beyond removing operational work, Grafana Cloud adds capabilities the self-hosted options don’t include:

- **Observability solutions**: Kubernetes Monitoring, Application Observability, Database Observability, Frontend Observability, and more
- **Testing and reliability**: Synthetic Monitoring, Grafana Cloud k6 (managed, distributed load testing), service-level objectives (SLOs), and Incident Response and Management
- **Cost and troubleshooting**: Adaptive Telemetry for managing data volume, plus the advanced Grafana Assistant capabilities that require the managed backend, such as infrastructure memory, hosted Cloud MCP connections, and cross-session incident investigations. The core Assistant also runs on self-hosted OSS and Enterprise. Grafana Cloud is where it becomes the most powerful.
- **Service-level agreement (SLA)**: Grafana Cloud commits to a 99.5% SLA covering the success of requests and autonomous actions (such as alert evaluation and synthetic checks), not simply uptime.
- **Instant upgrades**: Grafana Labs handles version updates, security patches, and backups automatically.

## Best for

Teams who want full observability without managing infrastructure. This is the recommended starting point.

## Get started

A free tier lets you start at no cost. You can buy directly or through a cloud marketplace for consolidated billing.

[Sign up for free](https://grafana.com/signup/cloud/connect-account)

### Other ways to buy

Grafana Cloud is also available through these marketplaces for consolidated billing:

- [AWS Marketplace](/products/marketplaces/aws-marketplace/)
- [Azure Marketplace](https://azuremarketplace.microsoft.com/en-us/marketplace/apps/grafana-labs.grafana-cloud-new?tab=overview)
- [Google Cloud Marketplace](/integrations/cloud-monitoring-google-cloud/)