What it does
Grafana Cloud is a hosted observability platform built around Grafana dashboards and managed telemetry services. It accepts data from sources such as Prometheus, Graphite, InfluxDB, Datadog, Loki and OpenTelemetry. Teams configure collection or instrumentation, send telemetry, then use queries and dashboards to investigate changes. The platform can store and visualize data, but it cannot diagnose a system that has not been instrumented or connected.
Grafana Cloud becomes useful after a team decides what signals it needs. For metrics, follow the documented path for the existing source, such as Prometheus or Graphite. For logs, Grafana recommends Grafana Alloy or the OpenTelemetry Collector; for traces, the docs describe Tempo and formats including Jaeger, Zipkin and OpenTelemetry. A dashboard is only the last step: first configure an agent or integration to send the data, then query it and create visualizations or alerts that match the service's operational questions.
This separation helps distinguish detection from diagnosis. An alert rule can notify an engineer that a threshold or condition has been met; metrics, logs and traces provide context for locating the cause. The engineer still needs to investigate and change the application or infrastructure.
Grafana Cloud has an always-free tier with usage limits and 14-day retention for several telemetry types. Paid usage adds longer retention and higher allowances. Review product-specific ingestion and retention limits before moving a large telemetry stream.
Strengths
- The platform accepts several metrics formats and supports logs, traces, and profiles.
- Grafana Alloy and the OpenTelemetry Collector are documented ways to send logs.
- Dashboards and queries can bring data from managed and external sources together.
Watch out for
- Telemetry must be instrumented or collected and sent before the dashboard can show it.
- The free tier has usage limits and shorter retention than paid plans.
Best for
- Centralizing service metrics, logs, and traces for incident investigation
- Teams that already emit Prometheus or OpenTelemetry telemetry
Sources
- Grafana Cloud | AI-Powered Full-Stack Observability | Grafana Labs (Oct 25, 2026)
- Grafana Cloud documentation (Oct 25, 2026)
- Instrument and send data to Grafana Cloud (Oct 25, 2026)
- Grafana Cloud pricing (Oct 25, 2026)