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What is Grafana?

Grafana is a data visualization tool. Grafana Cloud is an end-to-end observability platform built on open source standards, offering metrics, logs, traces, and visualization with usage-based pricing and flexible deployment options. Key capabilities: Metrics monitoring, Log aggregation, Distributed tracing, Profiling, Kubernetes monitoring. Grafana ships a free plan plus paid tiers that unlock as usage grows. Buyers most often compare Grafana against Prometheus, Dynatrace, AppDynamics.

TL;DR - Grafana

  • Open-source visualization for metrics
  • Beautiful dashboards from any data source
  • Alerting notifies you before users complain
Pricing: Free plan available
Best for: Growing teams
4.5/5 across review platforms

Pros & Cons

Pros

  • Powerful dashboards
  • Many data sources
  • Open source

Cons

  • Complex setup
  • Resource intensive

Ratings Across the Web

4.5(107 reviews)

Ratings aggregated from independent review platforms. Learn more

Key Features

Metrics monitoringLog aggregationDistributed tracingProfilingKubernetes monitoringFrontend observabilityPerformance testing (k6)Custom dashboards

Pricing Plans

Free Trial

Free

Free

Always free

  • All Grafana Cloud services
  • 10K metrics series
  • 50GB logs
  • 14-day retention
Most Popular

Pro

$19/month base

Plus usage

  • 8×5 support
  • 13 months metrics
  • 30 days logs/traces
  • 99.5% SLA

Enterprise

$25,000/year minimum

Spend commitment

  • Premium support
  • Custom retention
  • BYOC options
  • Custom SLA
Grafana Cloud is an end-to-end observability platform built on open source standards, offering metrics, logs, traces, and visualization with usage-based pricing and flexible deployment options.

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Grafana FAQ

How does Grafana Cloud differentiate itself from Grafana OSS?

Grafana Cloud is a complete, fully managed observability platform that unifies metrics, logs, traces, dashboards, alerting, incident response, and advanced integrations. In contrast, Grafana OSS is a self-managed, open-source tool primarily focused on visualization and alerting, lacking the full suite of observability capabilities found in Grafana Cloud.

What specific features does Grafana Cloud offer to help reduce telemetry costs?

Grafana Cloud includes Adaptive Telemetry features that utilize machine learning to aggregate unused metrics and optimize log volumes. This functionality helps organizations save money by reducing the amount of telemetry data they store and process, while also encouraging a closer look at metrics for further optimization opportunities.

Can Grafana Cloud assist with incident response management?

Yes, Grafana Cloud provides an integrated Incident Response Management (IRM) solution. This solution offers workflows for creating alerts and SLOs, managing on-call schedules and incident response, and conducting postmortems, all within the context of the observability stack.

What security and compliance standards does Grafana Cloud adhere to for enterprise use?

Grafana Cloud is built for enterprise-grade security and compliance, offering single sign-on (SSO), role-based access control (RBAC), audit logging, and SOC 2 compliance. For government agencies and regulated industries, Grafana Federal Cloud is available with FedRAMP High authorization, meeting the highest U.S. federal security standards.

Does Grafana Cloud support data ingestion from OpenTelemetry?

Yes, Grafana Cloud fully supports OpenTelemetry. This allows for easy ingestion and analysis of telemetry data from modern applications and infrastructure, ensuring compatibility with contemporary observability standards.

What types of pre-built solutions are available for monitoring with Grafana?

Grafana offers over 100 pre-built solutions for monitoring various systems, ranging from Kubernetes to database monitoring. These solutions include out-of-the-box dashboards, metrics, and alerts for technologies like Linux, Windows, Docker, PostgreSQL, MySQL, Kafka, and Jenkins.

Source: grafana.com

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