Overview

Grafana is a broad spectrum observability platform. It's functionality goes way beyond the three pillars model and includes a host of features such as synthetic testing, K6 Load testing, Profiling and more. The Grafana System has a number of tiers. The one which we are featuring is the Grafana Pro Pay As You Go SaaS product. This package includes a number of free allowances and charges are only applied for telemetry which exceeds the free allowance. The allowances are as follows:

• Logs 50GB
• Traces 50GB
• Metrics 10k series.

Any usage above these thresholds is charged as follows:

• Logs: $0.50 per GB
• Traces: $0.50 per GB
• Metrics: $8 per 1k series

Therefore, if you ingest 100GB of logs per month the charge will be 50 * $0.50 - a total of $25.

Retention

Retention periods are fixed as follows:

• Metrics: 13 months
• Logs: 30 days
• Traces: 30 days.

Any variation on this would need to be negotiated with Grafana.

For the purposes of our estimator, we are only focusing on Logs, Metrics and Traces as these are common across most vendors. In addition to these Grafana Pro also includes the follwing free allowances per month:

• Profiles: 50GB
• Front end sessions: 50k
• Synthetic Tests Execution: 100k
• IRM users: 3

Metrics

There are two aspects of metrics to understand in the Grafana metrics pricing model:

• metrics series
• scrapes per minute

Active Metrics Series

If you are not sure about the definition of a metrics series then please check our glossary here

If we collect our data at 15 second intervals rather than 60 second intervals then we will have 128 active time series per minute. This is, in a general sense how Grafana defines active time series per minute.

If you have a thousand nodes and each node has 16 CPU's and you are collecting data 4 times per minute then you will have 1000 * 16 * 4 series per minute. Which equals 64,000 active series.

On the pro Pay as You Go Tier you are allowed 10k free active series. This means that 54,000 of those series will be chargeable. Since you are charged at $8 per 1k series, your metrics charge for the month will be 54 * $8. Which equals $432 per month.

Spikes

Any system can experience occasional spikes in activity which might temporarily push telemetry levels beyond their normal threshold. Grafana allows for this by applying 95th percentile billing.Which roughly means that the top 36 hours of usage each month is "forgiven". You can find out more here

For further information on Grafana Pricing please see the guidance on the Grafana web site.

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