The new Grafana Cloud: the only composable observability stack for metrics, logs, and traces, now with free and paid plans to suit every use case

Oftentimes users of open source are told to go download it and figure it out… or pay for a managed solution in the cloud. So the typical choice is free and do-it-yourself or expensive and easy. With our new changes to Grafana Cloud, we are making it both free and easy to have a real, composable observability solution. 

First, we’re introducing a brand-new Grafana Cloud free plan that gives you everything you need for monitoring: Prometheus and Graphite for metrics, Loki for logs, and Tempo for tracing, all integrated within Grafana. In a recent CNCF survey, Prometheus and Grafana were the top two observability tools cited by end users. And with Grafana Cloud, you get a service managed by the maintainers of these leading open source projects, whose deep knowledge allows us to run them efficiently at scale better than any other company in the world.

We’re also upgrading our paid Grafana Cloud plan so that it now includes a ton of new features and five times more metrics. You can quickly get started with ample metrics, logs, and users included for just $49/month. Metrics and logs are billed based on ingestion, so you can quickly scale with your environment.

Easy to use and flexible, with both a free and a transparently priced option, Grafana Cloud provides an observability solution that can suit every use case.

A forever free plan

The new Grafana Cloud free plan is a composable observability solution, with metrics and logs integrated within Grafana, and it’s managed by us completely for free. We’re focused on bringing real-time monitoring to our users’ hands as quickly as possible, with as little configuration as necessary. 

This plan includes:

• 10,000 series for Prometheus or Graphite metrics
• 50GB of logs
• 500VUh of k6 testing
• 14 day retention for metrics and logs
• Access for up to 3 team members

The new Pro paid plan

Our paid plan is getting a big facelift. All subscribed Cloud customers will now get five times more metrics included each month. 

Pro includes:

• 15,000 series for metrics with 13-month retention (previously 3,000)
• 100GB of logs with 1-month retention
• Reporting and PDF exports
• Advanced authentication (SAML/OAuth/LDAP)
• Data source permissions
• Team collaboration with dashboard insights and team presence
• Custom domains

Best of all, most of you will see a few hundred dollars in savings each month with the new limits! Grafana Cloud Pro will begin to roll out to existing users this month. Customers using Grafana Cloud Enterprise (renamed Grafana Cloud Advanced) will also benefit from all of the same upgrades to our new Pro plan.

Features included in Grafana Cloud for all users

These new and improved features make Grafana Cloud an easy-to-use, composable observability solution:

• One-click integrations: With our growing library of Cloud integrations (such as Go, MySQL, and CockroachDB), users have access to preconfigured dashboards, enabling them to go from blank slate to beautiful Grafana dashboards and alerts in just a few clicks. 
• Enhanced alerting: Unified experience for managing powerful Prometheus-style alerting rules for both metrics and logs directly in Grafana.
• Synthetic monitoring: Observe how systems and applications are performing from a user’s point of view by monitoring applications and API endpoints from dozens of locations around the world, without having to instrument metrics.
• Grafana Agent. This lightweight collector for sending data to Grafana Cloud makes installation even easier.
• Free open-beta access to Tempo, our new tracing solution.

Choose what’s right for you

The origin story of Grafana Cloud is one of open source. Just like the development of our features, Grafana Cloud was first born from the pains and needs of our open source community. We were looking to give users a quick way to get Grafana up and running. It was a product created out of necessity, and it made sense at the time because it’s what our customers wanted back then.

But as technology has evolved, so have our customers’ applications and operational needs. That led to building Grafana Cloud into a full-stack observability solution incorporating other open source technologies such as Cortex for scalable Prometheus, Loki for logging, and Tempo for tracing. Considering our open source roots, adding a fully featured free plan only makes sense. 

The new plans make Grafana Cloud more flexible than ever. To all of our current users, I hope Grafana Cloud continues to meet and exceed your expectations of a Grafana-based monitoring solution. If you’re not already using Grafana Cloud, sign up today for free and see which plan meets your use case.