The value of Grafana Cloud

With Grafana Cloud, you are able to:

• Focus on the systems you’re monitoring and stop managing observability infrastructure.
• Start monitoring sooner with prebuilt dashboards, integrations, and alerting.
• Troubleshoot more easily by having metrics, logs, traces, and profiles in one platform.
• Scale on demand without capacity planning or storage tuning.
• Track usage with built-in alerts and reduce unnecessary ingestion with adaptive telemetry.

A self-hosted observability stack requires you to deploy, scale, upgrade, and operate multiple tools: metrics databases, log aggregators, trace backends, and the dashboards that visualize your data. Each component adds operational burden. The time you spend keeping these tools running is time you’re not spending on the systems they monitor.

As a fully managed platform, Grafana Cloud removes this burden. Each account includes:

• Managed databases for metrics, logs, traces, and profiles
• A Grafana instance
• Access to all core platform services

Grafana Cloud gives you flexibility in how you work with your data:

• Send data: use Grafana Alloy, Prometheus remote_write, or the OTLP endpoint to forward telemetry over public or private networks.
• Connect to external data: point Grafana Cloud at an existing data source such as a Prometheus server or PostgreSQL database and query it in place without migrating data.

In the next milestone, you explore the options for sending data to Grafana Cloud.