Understand your Grafana Cloud Application Observability invoice

Grafana Cloud calculates Application Observability usage based on the total number of host hours per month.

What is a host hour?

A Host is a physical or virtual operating system instance that is sending observability signals including traces and span metrics. A host is considered active if it has sent observability signals in the last 15 minutes. Billable host hours is the total number of host hours measured during the month.

By billing based on active host hours, customers are not billed for peak host usage (99th percentile), but rather the actual host hours consumed during the billing month.

When does the host hour based pricing apply?

Host hours based pricing is only applicable for customers that are using the Application Observability product offering in Grafana Cloud.

For customers not using the Application Observability product offering in Grafana Cloud and instead building their own dashboards, alerts, and workflows to monitor applications, standard pricing for Grafana Cloud Metrics, Logs, Traces, Profiles, and Visualization applies and there are no charges based on host hours.

How does host hour pricing work for serverless environments?

For customers using Application Observability in serverless environments, usage is billed based on the telemetry ingested into Grafana Cloud.

Example pricing table

The table below provides a billing example. Host hours are determined by multiplying the number of active hosts by the number of active hours per day and by the number of days per month. The examples assume that there are 720 hours in a month.

Environment Name	Hosts	Active hours per month	Host hours	Price per month
Production	5	100%	3,600	$144.00
Staging	3	50%	1,080	$43.20
Development	1	10%	72	$2.88
		Total	4,752	$190.08

Inquire here for volume discounts.

Credit for metrics active series and traces

For Application Observability users, a credit of 1.5 active series and 0.02 GB of traces per host hour is applied to your invoice (this translates to ~1080 metric active series and ~14.4 GB of traces ingest per host that is active for 720 hours in a month).

95% of customers remain within this included usage in terms of telemetry ingestion on a per host hour basis. For customers exceeding this included usage, standard pricing for metrics and traces applies.

For more details about metrics and traces pricing, refer to Understand your Grafana Cloud Metrics invoice and Understand your Grafana Cloud Traces invoice.

Usage calculations

Application Observability usage is billed at $0.04 per host hour for usage in addition to the amount included in your plan. Billable host hours is the total number of host hours measured during the month.