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January 12, 2021

Grafana Labs Pushes Open Source to the Cloud

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Grafana Labs is building on its recent cloud partnership with Amazon Web Services via expanded cloud services that can be used with the Prometheus monitoring platform in an observability stack that also tracks logs and traces.

The open source tool developer said this week it is releasing a free cloud tier for monitoring Prometheus along with Graphite for metrics, Loki for logs and Grafana Labs’ new tracing tool, Tempo. Unlike traditional managed services, Grafana promotes its monitoring tools as managed by the maintainers of those popular open source projects.

Meanwhile, a paid version of the managed service priced at $49 a month incorporates new features and “five times more metrics,” the company said Tuesday (Jan. 12).

The free plan includes up to 10,000 series for Prometheus and Graphite metrics, 50 Gb of log storage and access for up to three users. The paid tier adds up to 15,000 series for metrics, 100 Gb of log storage, reporting capabilities, data source permissions and a collaboration dashboard, among other features.

New features include integrations with cloud-based services such as MySQL and CockroachDB along with “synthetic monitoring” used to observe how applications and APIs are performing from the users’ perspective.

An alerting feature is designed to manage Prometheus-based rules for both logs and metrics, doing so directly in Grafana.

The paid tier also includes free beta access to Tempo, the company’s distributed tracing backend. Running on object storage alone, Tempo is “deeply integrated” with Grafana, Prometheus and Loki, the company said.

The new cloud service will be rolled out to existing users over the next few months, Grafana Labs added.

The tiered cloud service follows the released last month of the Amazon Managed Service for Grafana. The cloud platform allows AWS customers to run the observation platform alongside other AWS services. The Grafana managed service on AWS includes secure data visualization for querying and correlating operational metrics, logs and traces across AWS as well as Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure.

The new AWS managed services underscore the popularity of the Grafana-Prometheus combination as more enterprises use it to monitor mission-critical applications.

AWS also has launched a managed service for Prometheus, the machine data storage and monitoring platform for cloud-native deployments. The Prometheus cloud service is built on Cortex, the open source monitoring system launched by Grafana Labs last year.

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