Understand billing and usage in Grafana Cloud

Welcome to the Grafana Cloud learning path that teaches you how to understand and manage your billing and usage, identify cost drivers, and set up alerts to control spending.

Managing observability costs is critical for teams using Grafana Cloud at scale. As your monitoring grows, it’s essential to understand where costs come from and how to control them to maintain a sustainable observability strategy. The Cost Management and Billing app gives you full transparency into your spend in one place, so you can see which products drive your monthly bill and make informed decisions about your observability budget.

Here’s what to expect

When you complete this path, you’ll be able to:

• Open the Cost Management and Billing app and find your way around its tabs
• Identify which Grafana Cloud products drive your monthly costs
• Explain how billing is calculated for metrics, logs, traces, profiles, and other products
• Create usage and cost alerts to monitor and control your spending proactively

Before you begin

Before you understand billing and usage, ensure that you have:

• A Grafana Cloud account with active usage. To create an account, refer to Grafana Cloud.
• The permissions granted by the Billing and usage reader role to view usage data, and the Usage alerts admin role to create alerts. Refer to Manage access to the Cost Management and Billing app.
• Basic familiarity with Grafana Cloud products such as metrics, logs, and traces.

Troubleshooting

If you get stuck, we’ve got your back! Where appropriate, troubleshooting information is just a click away.

More to explore

We understand you might want to explore other capabilities not strictly on this path. We’ll provide you opportunities where it makes sense.