Grafana Cloud Cost Management

Docs: https://grafana.com/docs/grafana-cloud/cost-management-and-billing/

Reduce metric / log / trace spend with Adaptive signals + cost-attribution labels.

Prerequisites

• A Grafana Cloud stack with Adaptive Metrics / Logs / Traces enabled (visible under Cost Management)
• Alloy (or Grafana Agent) ingesting telemetry, with API key in scope metrics:write + logs:write (+ traces:write)
• Admin access to the stack to apply Adaptive recommendations

Common Workflows

1. Attribute cost to a team / service

# 1. Add external labels in Alloy (metrics + logs configs)
prometheus.remote_write "cloud" {
  endpoint { url = sys.env("PROMETHEUS_URL") /* ... */ }
  external_labels = { team = "platform", project = "checkout-service" }
}

# 2. Reload Alloy
curl -X POST http://localhost:12345/-/reload

# 3. Verify labels arrived in Grafana Cloud
#    In Explore, run:  count by (team, project) ({__name__=~".+"})
#    Then visit Cost Management → group by `team` / `project`

See references/adaptive-signals.md for the full Alloy snippet.

2. Cut metric cardinality with Adaptive Metrics

# 1. Pull recommendations
curl https://<stack>.grafana.net/api/plugins/grafana-adaptive-metrics-app/resources/v1/recommendations \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer <token>" | jq '.recommendations | length'

# 2. In the UI: Grafana Cloud → Adaptive Metrics → review rules sorted by series-reduction impact
# 3. Test in "Preview" mode before applying
# 4. Apply (takes effect within 5 min)

# 5. Verify — series count should drop on the affected metrics
#    Before applying, capture baseline:
#      count({__name__="http_request_duration_seconds_bucket"})
#    Wait 10 min after apply, run again — expect 10x+ reduction for high-card metrics.

# Rollback if needed: open the rule in the UI → Disable, or DELETE /v1/rules/<id>.

3. Drop noisy logs in Alloy

# 1. Add a filter stage (see references/adaptive-signals.md for the full block)
loki.process "filter_logs" {
  forward_to = [loki.write.cloud.receiver]
  stage.drop { expression = ".*GET /health.*" }
}

# 2. Reload Alloy
curl -X POST http://localhost:12345/-/reload

# 3. Verify the filter — health logs should NOT appear in Logs Drilldown
#    LogQL check (should return 0):
#      sum(rate({app="my-app"} |= "GET /health" [5m]))
#    Bytes-ingested should also drop. Compare 24h before/after:
#      sum(increase(loki_ingester_chunk_size_bytes_sum[24h])) by (namespace)

4. Set a usage alert before you hit quota

See references/alerts-and-queries.md for ready-to-paste rules (MetricsUsageHigh, LogsIngestionHigh).

Optimization checklist

• Apply Adaptive Metrics recommendations — typically reduces series 40-60%
• Drop health/readiness probe logs in Alloy
• Tail-sample traces to 5-10% + keep errors / slow spans
• Add team + project external labels to every Alloy config
• Set usage alerts at 80% of quota
• Replace expensive ad-hoc queries with recording rules

References

• references/adaptive-signals.md — Adaptive Metrics / Logs / Traces config; cost-attribution labels
• references/alerts-and-queries.md — usage alert rules, cost-finding PromQL, billing-unit table

Resources

• Cost Management docs
• Adaptive Metrics
• Adaptive Logs