Managed Grafana
Definition
Fully managed Grafana for creating dashboards and alerts without running Grafana infrastructure — connects to CloudWatch, Prometheus, and other sources.
Use Cases
- The LEGO Group: Centralized observability dashboards for cloud-native services — Uses Grafana as part of its monitoring/observability approach to visualize metrics and operational signals across services, typically integrating Grafana with time-series data sources (for example, Prometheus-compatible metrics) and alerting workflows. (Faster troubleshooting and improved operational visibility by consolidating key service health indicators into shared dashboards for engineering teams.)
- Deliveroo: Microservices monitoring and on-call visibility — Uses Grafana dashboards to visualize service metrics and support incident response, commonly pairing Grafana with Prometheus-style metrics collection in a microservices environment. (Improved on-call effectiveness through consistent, real-time dashboards that help engineers detect and diagnose issues more quickly.)
- Shopify: Operational dashboards for large-scale production systems — Uses Grafana to build dashboards that surface key performance and reliability signals, integrating with metrics backends and internal observability tooling to provide shared views for teams. (Better cross-team visibility into system behavior and quicker identification of performance regressions using standardized dashboards.)
Provider Equivalents
- AWS: Amazon Managed Grafana
- Azure: Azure Managed Grafana
- GCP: Managed Service for Grafana
Frequently Asked Questions
- What's the difference between Managed Grafana and self-hosted Grafana?
- Managed Grafana is run for you by a cloud provider: they handle provisioning, scaling, patching, and service availability. You focus on dashboards, data sources, and access control. Self-hosted Grafana gives you full control and flexibility, but you must manage servers/containers, upgrades, backups, security hardening, and high availability yourself.
- When should I use Managed Grafana?
- Use Managed Grafana when you want Grafana dashboards quickly without operating the platform. It’s a good fit if you need secure team access (SSO/IAM), predictable uptime, easy integration with cloud monitoring services, and you’d rather spend time on observability content (dashboards, alerts, SLO views) than on maintaining Grafana infrastructure.
- How much does Managed Grafana cost?
- Pricing depends on the provider and typically scales by active users, workspace tiers/features, and sometimes usage-related factors. You also pay separately for the data sources you query (for example, CloudWatch metrics/logs, Prometheus storage, tracing systems) and any network egress or query costs those services incur. To estimate total cost, consider: number of users who will log in, required enterprise features (if applicable), and the volume/frequency of queries against your metrics/logs/traces backends.
Category: monitoring
Difficulty: intermediate
Related Terms
See Also