Monitor GEL using Grafana Cloud

Grafana Labs champions the value of observability for your software applications and infrastructure. This extends to the Database solutions offered as part of the Grafana Enterprise Stack: namely Grafana Enterprise Metrics, Logs, and Traces. Successful operation of these databases requires comprehensive monitoring and alerting. This allows the teams managing these Databases to swiftly identify issues and diagnose their root causes. Grafana Labs itself maintains robust observability for the Grafana Enterprise Metrics, Logs, and Traces Databases it operates to power Grafana Cloud, our hosted observability-as-a-service offering.

Our recommended approach for monitoring your Grafana Enterprise Databases is to use Grafana Cloud. This approach is the easiest, most robust way to observe your database in accordance with Grafana Labs best practices and is included free of charge with your purchase of a Grafana Enterprise Database.

How it works

Each Grafana Enterprise Database is instrumented for observability by default. Each Database component exposes metrics on a scrapable Prometheus compatible /metrics endpoint and emits logs and traces.

The Helm chart for each Enterprise Database includes an option for meta monitoring. When enabled, the Helm chart deploys a Grafana Agent alongside the Enterprise Database. The Agent is configured to collect metrics and logs from all database components and apply additional metadata, such as extra labels to indicate where the metrics or logs were scraped from. The Agent ONLY collects logs and metrics relevant to the internal system state of the Grafana Enterprise Databases; no other information is collected.

From there, the Grafana Agent forwards the telemetry data to your Grafana Cloud account, where it can be stored and queried to help you understand the health of your Grafana Enterprise Database. You can access this account at any time, and have complete control over who has access to it using Grafana Cloud’s identity and access management functionality. Availability and uptime adhere to the Grafana Cloud SLA.

Additionally, this Grafana Cloud account is preconfigured with Grafana Labs’ recommended dashboards for visualizing the telemetry data collected from your Grafana Enterprise Database. Should you choose, you can also create alerts on the data in this account to notify you when the telemetry data collected from your Grafana Enterprise Database is no longer within expected parameters. Grafana Labs can provide a recommended set of alerts to configure.

If you need to file a support escalation, you can choose to give the Grafana Labs support team access to the telemetry data in your Grafana Cloud account. Historically, Grafana Labs has found that faster access to telemetry data radically reduces the time needed to resolve escalations.