Documentation Grafana Cloud Monitor applications Application Observability Host-hours pricing

Application Observability host-hours pricing

From September 1, 2024, Grafana Cloud Application Observability requires you to send additional telemetry to capture the hosts that are sending observability signals to Grafana Cloud to ensure accurate billing and uninterrupted service. This change applies to every customer of Grafana Cloud that uses Application Observability.

To use Application Observability beyond September 1, 2024, you need to send a traces_host_info metric via either Grafana Alloy or OpenTelemetry Collector.

The rollout of this pricing change varies by customer type:

• Self-Serve users on Pro and Advanced plans: The new pricing model was applied immediately on September 1, 2024.
• Contracted organizations: The new pricing model is applied upon contract renewal.

For information about the pricing and billing for Application Observability, refer to these resources:

• Grafana Cloud Pricing for Application Observability
• Understand your Application Observability Invoice

Definition of host

Hosts can be any of the following:

• Physical Servers: Dedicated machines that run an operating system and applications.
• Virtual Machines (VMs): Instances of operating systems running on virtualized environments, such as those managed by VMware, Hyper-V, or cloud providers like AWS EC2, Azure Virtual Machines, and so on.

What is not a host

A container is an isolated application environment running on a host system. Containers, like those managed by Docker, are not considered hosts because they do not represent a full operating system instance.

Grafana Kubernetes Monitoring

If you use Grafana Kubernetes Monitoring you need to update the Kubernetes monitoring agent configuration with one of the options:

Kubernetes monitoring wizard

Enable the Enable Application Observability for this cluster toggle.

Helm Chart

Set receivers.grafanaCloudMetrics to true in values.yaml.

Grafana Alloy

If you use Alloy to send relevant signals, enable the host_info connector in your Alloy deployment, for more information consult the Alloy OpenTelemetry component documentation.

river Copy

// NOTE: This is an example to show the data flow, please see the documentation at 
// https://grafana.com/docs/grafana-cloud/monitor-applications/application-observability/setup/collector/grafana-alloy/
// for a full example configuration file

otelcol.receiver.otlp "default" {
	// https://grafana.com/docs/alloy/latest/reference/components/otelcol.receiver.otlp/

	// configures the default grpc endpoint "0.0.0.0:4317"
	grpc { }
	// configures the default http/protobuf endpoint "0.0.0.0:4318"
	http { }

    output {
		traces  = [
			otelcol.processor.batch.default.input,
			otelcol.connector.host_info.default.input, // WITHOUT THIS LINE, YOU WILL NOT GENERATE THE HOST_INFO 
		]
	}
}

otelcol.connector.host_info "default" {
  // https://grafana.com/docs/alloy/latest/reference/components/otelcol.connector.host_info/
  host_identifiers = ["host.name"]

  output {
    metrics = [otelcol.processor.batch.default.input]
  }
}

An example configuration that includes the connector is available from the Application Observability Alloy set up documentation.

OpenTelemetry Collector

If you use an OpenTelemetry Collector to send signals to Grafana Cloud, you need to enable the grafanacloud connector in your collector.

An example configuration that has the grafanacloud connector enabled is available in the Application Observability OpenTelemetry Collector set up documentation.

Host-hours telemetry notification

If you use Grafana Cloud’s Application Observability and you don’t send host-hours telemetry, the system displays a notification.

Learn how to send host-hours telemetry.

If you don’t plan to use Application Observability any longer, read how to disable it to avoid charges.

Enable host-hours telemetry

Here are a few ways to enable host-hour telemetry, depending on your setup. In general, every host that sends application-level signals into Grafana Cloud for use with Application Observability must send host-hours telemetry.

• Learn how to send host-hours telemetry for your Kubernetes clusters observed with Grafana Cloud Kubernetes monitoring.
• Learn how to send host-hours telemetry for hosts observed with Grafana Alloy.
• Learn how to send host-hours telemetry for hosts observed with the OpenTelemetry Collector.

Disable Application Observability in Grafana Cloud

If you don’t want to use Application Observability in Grafana Cloud, you can disable it.

Disable metrics generation in Application Observability

Follow these steps to stop metrics generation:

1. Select Configuration under Application in the left navigation of your Grafana Cloud instance.
2. Click the System tab.
3. Under Grafana Cloud traces metric generation, click Deactivate.

Adjust your Alloy / Collector configuration

For Alloy instances, remove the otelcol.connector.host_info component from your pipeline.

For Helm-managed Alloy instances like Grafana Cloud K8s monitoring, set receivers.grafanaCloudMetrics to false in values.yaml and redeploy.