Learn how your cost is calculated

Grafana Cloud uses different billing methodologies depending on the product or feature to offer predictable pricing.

Ninety-fifth percentile billing for metrics

Grafana Cloud Metric ingestion is billed on the ninety-fifth percentile of activity each month, based on:

• Active series: Unique time series receiving new data points within 30 minutes
• Data points per minute (DPM): How frequently data is sent to Grafana Cloud

Your billable metrics usage is calculated as the maximum of either active series or total DPM:

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usage = max(active_series, total_dpm/included_dpm)

Ninety-fifth percentile billing advantage

Grafana Cloud uses ninety-fifth percentile billing for metrics, which provides significant advantages:

• Forgives temporary usage spikes during incidents or deployments
• Provides predictable monthly costs based on typical usage patterns
• Eliminates billing for the top 5% of usage time each calendar month (approximately 36 hours)

This means if you normally send 6,000 active series but spike to 30,000 for 24 hours in a month, you’re still billed at the 6,000 series rate.

Scrape interval impact on costs

Your scrape interval directly affects DPM and costs:

• 15-second interval: 4 data points per minute (higher cost)
• 30-second interval: 2 data points per minute (medium cost)
• 60-second interval: 1 data point per minute (lower cost, recommended default)

A recommended approach is to use a 1-minute scrape interval as the global default and only increase frequency for jobs that need higher resolution. For optimization strategies, refer to Reduce metrics costs by adjusting your data points per minute (DPM).

Volume-based billing for logs and traces

Grafana Cloud Logs, Traces, and Profiles are based on the amount of bytes received and retained each month:

Log usage billing factors:

• Gigabytes ingested per month
• Retention period in 30-day increments (minimum 30 days)
• Gigabytes queried per month: the fair use query policy allows querying up to 100X your ingested volume monthly without additional cost

For complete logs billing details, refer to Understand your Grafana Cloud Logs invoice.

Traces usage billing factors:

• Gigabytes ingested per month
• Retention period in 30-day increments (minimum 30 days)

For complete traces billing details, refer to Understand your Grafana Cloud Traces invoice.

Profiles usage billing factors:

• Gigabytes ingested per month
• Retention period in 30-day increments (minimum 30 days)

For complete profiles billing details, refer to Understand your Grafana Cloud Profiles invoice.

Specialized product billing

Each specialized product has tailored billing models:

• Application Observability: Billed by host hours with automatic host detection. For details, refer to Understand your Application Observability invoice.

• Frontend Observability: Billed by session count with included traces and logs credits. For details, refer to Understand your Frontend Observability invoice.

• Incident Response & Management (IRM): Billed by the number of users that are part of an OnCall configuration or declaring or updating an Incident. For details, refer to Understand your Grafana Cloud IRM invoice.

• Kubernetes Monitoring: Billed by active host and container hours for your Kubernetes environment. For details, refer to Understand your Kubernetes Monitoring invoice.

• Synthetic Monitoring: Billed by test execution count with included metrics and logs credits. For details, refer to Understand your Synthetic Monitoring invoice.

• Performance Testing: Billed by Virtual User Hours (VUH) consumed per test, optional static IP addresses, and data retention. For details, refer to Understand your Performance Testing invoice.

Optimization strategies

Understanding billing calculations helps you optimize costs:

• Apply Adaptive Telemetry recommendations
• Use cardinality management dashboards to identify high-cost metrics
• Adjust scrape intervals based on actual monitoring needs
• Monitor unused metrics for potential removal

For comprehensive cost management, refer to Adaptive Telemetry.

In the next milestone, you create a billing alert to proactively monitor your Grafana Cloud usage costs.