Host-hours pricing for Kubernetes Monitoring

Starting September 17, 2024, new customers who send Kubernetes-related metrics using kube-state-metrics are billed using host-hours pricing instead of being billed for data ingestion.

Definition of host

A host is any Kubernetes Node (whether it’s a virtual machine or a physical machine) or container actively sending observability signals. Billable host hours are the total time that active hosts are monitored each month.

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.

What is not 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 OS kernel with other containers on the same host.

How hours are tracked

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

kube_node_info
kube_pod_container_info
kube_pod_info

Kubernetes Monitoring usage is billed during a calendar month using a sum of:

$0.015 per active Node hour
$0.001 per active container hour

Billable hours are the sum of the time that active hosts send monitoring signals to Grafana Cloud during the month.

Windows nodes

If you are running Windows nodes within a Kubernetes Cluster, you are billed for host hours if kube-state-metrics is present within the same Cluster.

Non-Prometheus telemetry data

If you use OTel-style telemetry or other data collection methods (such as VictoriaMetrics) with Kubernetes Monitoring, these methods result in a partial or empty set of data. Without the data available from the kube-state-metrics exporter, active nodes and containers can’t be detected, and you won’t be billed for host hours.

Invoice

For more information about your invoice, refer to Understand your Kubernetes Monitoring invoice.

Existing customers with ingestion-based billing

If you have been using Kubernetes Monitoring in Grafana Cloud prior September 17th, 2024, Grafana won’t automatically transfer your account to host-hours billing. However, if you want to migrate to this form of billing, contact support to evaluate your situation and accommodate your request where possible.