Documentation Grafana Cloud Cost management and billing Understand your invoice Kubernetes Monitoring invoice

Understand your Grafana Cloud Kubernetes Monitoring invoice

Grafana Cloud calculates Kubernetes Monitoring usage based on the total number of host hours and container hours per calendar month.

What is a host and host hour?

A host is any physical or virtual Kubernetes machine, within a cluster that is sending kube-state-metrics. In a Kubernetes environment, the host is the Kubernetes node.

Billable usage is calculated per hour as the sum of active hosts (Nodes) and containers in 15-minute intervals. A host is considered active if it has sent kube-state-metrics data within the last 15 minutes. For example, if a host or container is alive for 15 minutes, you only pay for 15 minutes.

How are host hours calculated?

To convert hosts to host hours, multiply the number of hosts by the number of hours the host is alive, then multiply by the number of days in an average month.

For example, 1 host that is active for 24 hours = 1 host _ 24 hours _ 30 days = 720 host hours.

What is not considered a host?

A Pod (a group of one or more containers) is not considered a host. Pods run within Nodes, which are the actual hosts. Containers such as Docker containers are not considered hosts because they do not represent a full operating system instance. Instead, they share the operating system kernel with other containers on the same host.

For more details, refer to Host-hours pricing for Kubernetes Monitoring.

How are host and container hours tracked?

Grafana tracks active Kubernetes hosts and containers based on the following data collected from kube-state-metrics:

• kube_node_info
• kube_pod_container_info

Kubernetes Monitoring usage is billed during a calendar month at:

• $0.015 per active host hour
• $0.001 per active container hour

A host is considered active if it has sent kube-state-metrics data within the last 15 minutes.

Example pricing table

The table below provides a billing example assuming a month with 30 days for a total of 720 hours, however note that this varies based on the number of days each month.

Inquire here for volume discounts.

Credit for active series

A credit of 1 billable series per host hour and 0.10 billable series per container hour is applied to your monthly invoice. Assuming the hosts and containers are active for 720 hours in a month, the total credit is approximately 720 active series per host hour per month and 72 series per container hour per month.

The majority of customers remain within this amount of included telemetry ingestion on a per host hour and per container hour basis. For customers exceeding this included usage, standard pricing for metric ingestion applies.

When does the host hour based pricing apply?

Host hours-based pricing applies whenever you send Kubernetes-related observability signals to Grafana Cloud using the kube-state-metrics add-on, whether you use Grafana Kubernetes Monitoring Helm Chart or another tool such as OTel Collector.

If you have been using Kubernetes Monitoring in Grafana Cloud prior to September 17th, 2024, billable usage for Kubernetes Monitoring is based on the underlying telemetry generated. Plans remain on the telemetry billing model unless you would like to migrate to the host-hours billing model. Contact the support team to request moving to the host- hours billing model.

View a usage summary

The Billing and Usage dashboard provides a usage summary for all Grafana Cloud services and billable data sources.

Usage details for Kubernetes Monitoring can be found on the panels titled Infrastructure Observability Host and Infrastructure Observability Container.

Find your invoice

You can view your invoice from your Cloud Portal.

To access your invoice:

1. Sign in to Grafana Cloud.
2. From the left navigation, select Billing > Invoices.
3. Select an invoice to view.

The most recent invoice is listed first, and you can view and download it as a PDF or CSV file.