Comparing Grafana Labs open source projects to Grafana Cloud

Grafana service dashboard

We build software in the open, with thriving communities, because we believe investing in open source will help leave the world a little better than we found it. Grafana Labs started with our flagship open source project, Grafana. We’ve also launched Grafana Loki, Grafana Tempo, Grafana Mimir, Grafana Faro, and Grafana Beyla, and contribute to successful projects in this space, such as OpenTelemetry and Prometheus.

The ubiquitous visualization, dashboarding, and alerting tool for all of your data.

A cost-efficient, high-scale distributed tracing backend.

A horizontally scalable, highly available, multi-tenant TSDB for long-term storage for Prometheus.

A horizontally scalable, highly available, multi-tenant log aggregation system inspired by Prometheus.

Grafana Cloud is a fully managed observability offering that packages together metrics, logs, and traces with Grafana. Leverage the best open source observability software – including Prometheus, Mimir, Loki, and Tempo – without the overhead of having to install, maintain, and scale it yourself. Enable observability faster and easier with turnkey solutions for Kubernetes monitoring, application observability, and more.

Dedicated Grafana frontend with enhanced reporting, security, management, and more

Super fast, highly available Prometheus-compatible backend with long-term storage, powered by Grafana Mimir

Easy-to-operate, highly scalable, and cost-effective distributed tracing system, powered by Grafana Tempo

Logging system powered by Grafana Loki for storing and querying logs from all your applications and infrastructure – without worrying about log volumes, costs, or storage limits

“By standardizing on Grafana Cloud, the team was able to troubleshoot issues and optimize our spend, giving us much more transparency and visibility into how the costs were calculated. As a result, we cut our costs dramatically.”
Dinesh Maheshwari
Technical Architect, Exabeam

Key differences

Open source

Grafana Cloud

Installation & deployment

  • Install, administer, and maintain on your own.
  • Self-managed in your own data center or cloud capacity.
  • Software is free, but there’s the overhead of setting up, configuring, scaling, and maintaining your stack.
  • No installation; simply sign up.
  • Fully managed by Grafana Labs using our cloud-hosted compute, so your team can focus on shipping code instead of maintaining infrastructure.
  • Generous forever-free plan, then pay-as-you-go pricing.
  • Easily scale metrics to 1B active series and beyond; get 13-month metrics retention for trend analysis and capacity planning and 30 days of log and trace retention.
  • Get instant upgrades and automatic security patches and backups.
  • Uptime SLA of 99.5%.

Security & support

  • Security features not included.
  • Support via Community Forums.
  • Securely query private data.
  • SSO/SAML/LDAP for user authentication.
  • Data source permissions plus role-based access control (RBAC) to control who can access what.
  • Dedicated support from the Grafana Labs team to provide critical response SLA, help establish best practices, as well as be an on-demand resource for ongoing questions.

Solutions & features

  • Not included.
  • Performance testing
    Grafana Cloud k6 provides a developer-centric experience to create tests faster and prevent system failures and consistently deliver reliable applications.
  • Frontend observability
    Hosted service for real user monitoring (RUM) that provides immediate, clear, actionable insights into the end user experience of web applications.
  • Application observability
    Unify signal types across application layers and gain granular, out-of-the-box insights into root causes of modern, complex application problems.
  • Kubernetes monitoring
    Quickly move throughout your Kubernetes setup in a single UI. Start with a cluster view and drill all the way down to specific Kubernetes pods with just a few clicks.
  • Continuous profiling
    Get insight into the resource usage of code to optimize infrastructure spend, simplify debugging, and enhance application performance.
  • Adaptive Metrics
    Metrics management and cardinality optimization feature allows teams to identify and eliminate unused time series data through aggregation.
  • SLO management
    Simplify SLO management with a guided UI, auto-generating dashboards, and multi-burn alerts.
  • Incident response & management
    This hosted IRM solution simplifies the incident workflow to help you focus on managing incidents, not your tools.
  • Cloud integrations
    Agent-free monitoring solutions offer tailored Grafana dashboards and alerting defaults for common observability targets.
  • Enterprise plugins
    Query and visualize disparate data sources – including MongoDB, Splunk, New Relic, Oracle, Salesforce, and more – from within Grafana.
  • Grafana Machine Learning
    Create predictions of the future state of systems and alert on unexpected changes or anomalies in behavior.
  • Usage insights
    Get a better understanding of how your Grafana instance is used.

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