Grafana Cloud is a uptime & monitoring tool for Developers and Enterprise, offered as freemium ($19/mo). Founded in United States in 2014. Popular alternatives include PagerDuty, Dynatrace.
About Grafana Cloud
Grafana is the open-source standard for observability dashboards, built by Grafana Labs, a company founded in 2014 around the project created by Torkel Ödegaard and now headquartered in New York. Grafana visualizes data from more than 150 sources, including Prometheus, Elasticsearch, Postgres, cloud monitoring services and SaaS tools, without moving data into a single store.
Grafana Labs packages its open-source projects into the LGTM stack: Loki for logs, Grafana for visualization, Tempo for traces and Mimir for Prometheus-compatible metrics, with Pyroscope for continuous profiling. Grafana Cloud runs this stack as a managed service and adds alerting, on-call and incident response, k6 load testing, synthetic monitoring, application observability and frontend monitoring. The free cloud tier includes metrics series, logs, traces and a few users; Pro is usage-based, and Enterprise adds enterprise data source plugins and support. Everything can also be self-hosted under the AGPL license.
Grafana suits engineering teams that are comfortable with open-source tools and want control over cost and data. Assembling and tuning the stack takes more work than a turnkey vendor, PromQL and LogQL need learning, and the product surface feels fragmented. Datadog and New Relic are more integrated but usually more expensive, while Elastic Observability is the main alternative for log-heavy teams.
Key features of Grafana Cloud
- Dashboards over 150+ data sources
- Prometheus-compatible metrics (Mimir)
- Logs with Loki and traces with Tempo
- Alerting, on-call and incident response
- k6 load testing and synthetic monitoring
- Self-hosted open source or managed cloud
Pros and cons
Pros
- Open source with no lock-in
- Generous free cloud tier
- Visualizes almost any data source
- Cost-effective at scale
Cons
- More setup than Datadog
- Query languages to learn (PromQL, LogQL)
- Fragmented product surface
- Enterprise features cost extra
Grafana Cloud pricing
Grafana Cloud uses a freemium model. A 14-day free trial is available.
| Plan | Price | Includes |
|---|---|---|
| Free | $0 | 10k metrics series, 50 GB logs/traces, 3 users, 14-day retention |
| Pro | $19 / mo | Platform fee plus usage; 3 users included, then $8/user |
| Enterprise | $25,000 / yr | Minimum annual spend commit; custom retention |
Source: grafana.com · checked on Oct 20, 2026
How Grafana Cloud compares in Uptime & monitoring
- Rank by votes
- #1 / 16
- Starting price
- $19
- Free alternatives
- 3
0 votes from members
21% below the category median ($24/mo)
Free or open-source tools in Uptime & monitoring
Grafana Cloud ranks #1 of 16 uptime & monitoring tools by community votes and is priced below most tools in the category.
Common use cases
- 1Kubernetes monitoring with Prometheus
- 2Unified dashboards across databases and clouds
- 3Log aggregation with Loki
- 4Load testing APIs with k6
Best for
Engineering teams comfortable with open-source observability who want control and lower cost.
Not ideal for
Teams wanting turnkey, fully integrated APM (Datadog, New Relic).
Integrations
- Prometheus
- Loki
- Tempo
- Mimir
- OpenTelemetry
- AWS CloudWatch
- PostgreSQL
- Elasticsearch
- 150+ data sources
Our take
Grafana is the default open observability stack; Grafana Cloud's free tier is the best starting point.
FAQ
- What is Grafana Cloud?
- Grafana Cloud is a Uptime & monitoring tool: Open-source observability dashboards.
- How much does Grafana Cloud cost?
- Grafana Cloud uses a Freemium model; paid plans start at $19 per month.
- What are the best alternatives to Grafana Cloud?
- Community-listed alternatives to Grafana Cloud include PagerDuty, Dynatrace.
- Does Grafana Cloud have a free trial?
- Yes, Grafana Cloud offers a 14-day free trial.
- What does Grafana Cloud integrate with?
- Grafana Cloud integrates with Prometheus, Loki, Tempo, Mimir, OpenTelemetry, AWS CloudWatch and more.
- Which platforms does Grafana Cloud support?
- Grafana Cloud is available on web.
- Who is Grafana Cloud for?
- Engineering teams comfortable with open-source observability who want control and lower cost.
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