The team behind analytics and visualisation tool Grafana has reworked the tiers of its managed observability offering Grafana Cloud, providing Pro users with more metrics for their money and those on a free plan with the option to share some insight.
In earlier versions of the free tier, access was restricted to one user, making it a bit tricky to use in somewhat more extensive open source projects or for evaluation purposes – even more so since working from home means you can’t just huddle around one screen to figure out if it’s working together anymore.
This has changed with the adjusted terms, which now allow subscribers to have up to three team members log into the Grafana Cloud and make use of the platform’s observability features.
To make the free tier even more useful, the Grafana Cloud team also decided to supply subscribers with access to Loki, Tempo, Prometheus, and Graphite for their logging, tracing, and metrics needs. The plan now includes 10,000 series for Prometheus or Graphite metrics, and 50 GB of memory for keeping logs. Retention for metrics and logs has been set to 14 days, which should be an acceptable base for many non-commercial scenarios.
Those needing a bit more should take a look at the revisited Pro plan, which has been extended to offer five times the metrics it formerly did. Subscriptions now contain 15,000 series for metrics and 13-month retention compared to the 3,000 Grafana Cloud previously provided. Authentication capabilities have been looked into as well, resulting in the addition of SAML support to the Pro tier’s advanced authentication section.
Along with the plan changes, Grafana Labs took the opportunity to improve the overall user experience by making some more features generally available. Amongst other things, users now have the option to check how systems and applications are performing from a user’s perspective via the synthetic monitoring capabilities, or use the Grafana Cloud Agent to get the service integrated into their setup quicker.
To turn Grafana Cloud from a managed Grafana into a full-fledged observability platform all versions now also include tracing support via Tempo, an open source project the company premiered last autumn, thus joining tech like Cortex, which has been integrated to meet changing scalability demands.
Further enhancements all subscribers have access to include enhanced Prometheus-like alerting for metrics and logs, and additional integrations to speed up the process of setting up dashboards and alerts. Old subscribers are promised they’ll see the changes popping up this month.