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Grafana Cloud
Observability platform with metrics (Prometheus), logs (Loki), and dashboards.
Use Cases
Monitor a production microservices stack with Prometheus metrics and Loki log aggregation
Create a comprehensive business dashboard combining infrastructure and application metrics
Free Tier
3 users, 10 dashboards, 10K metric series, 50GB logs
How to Maximize the Free Tier
Grafana Cloud's free tier (10K metric series, 50GB logs) is generous for small production setups. The metric series limit (10K) fills fastest — be selective about what you instrument and use recording rules to aggregate before storage. The 50GB log retention is generous — use structured logging with Loki to make those logs actually searchable. The real cost is the 3-user limit once your team grows.
Getting Started
Sign up → install Grafana Agent or Prometheus on your server → configure scrape targets → send logs via Promtail → build dashboards in Grafana UI → set up alert rules.
Pros
- Industry stack: Uses the industry-standard Prometheus + Loki + Tempo stack — transferable skills, huge ecosystem
- Log retention: 50GB log retention on the free tier is generous — enough for small to medium production applications
- Dashboard quality: Grafana's dashboard builder is the gold standard — rich visualizations, templating, and sharing
Cons
- User limit: Only 3 users on the free tier — team-wide access requires paid plans starting at $49/user/month
- Metric series: 10,000 metric series fills quickly when instrumenting multiple services with detailed metrics
- Configuration: Setting up Prometheus rules and alerting has a significant learning curve for new users