Summary
Grafana Cloud is the fully managed SaaS offering from Grafana Labs that bundles Grafana dashboards, Prometheus-compatible metrics storage (Mimir), Loki log aggregation, and Tempo distributed tracing in a single cloud-hosted platform.
What is Grafana Cloud?
Grafana Cloud removes the operational burden of running the Grafana observability stack. Teams point their existing Prometheus agents, Grafana Agents, or OpenTelemetry collectors at Grafana Cloud endpoints and immediately get dashboards, alerting, and long-term storage without managing any backend infrastructure.
The platform uses Grafana's open-source components internally — Mimir for metrics, Loki for logs, Tempo for traces — ensuring that data collected for Grafana Cloud can be migrated to self-hosted deployments if needed. This avoids hard vendor lock-in.
Grafana Cloud offers a free tier suitable for small teams and scales to enterprise plans with custom retention periods, private networks, and SLA guarantees. It is available on AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud in multiple regions.
Why is Grafana Cloud relevant?
- Operational simplicity: No cluster to manage; focus engineering effort on building dashboards
- Integrated stack: Metrics, logs, and traces in one platform with unified querying
- Cost control: Pay only for ingested data volume with the free tier covering small-scale use
- Global availability: Multi-region deployment reduces latency for distributed teams