Open standards, predictable bills, and unified incident response

Elasticsearch indexes everything. For observability log volumes, that model comes with a cost: storage grows well beyond your raw log size and tuning the system can consume significant engineering time. Grafana Cloud takes a different approach: store operational logs on inexpensive object storage and index only the metadata needed to route queries. Teams that switch report lower log bills and operational overhead.

Grafana Labs holds a seat on the OpenTelemetry governing board and is a top OTel contributor. Grafana Alloy is a fully OTel-native collector: your instrumentation stays in standard format all the way from collection to storage to query. This matters when you want to swap backends, add new signal types, or simply avoid being locked into a proprietary schema.

Elastic has expanded its observability offering over the years, but many teams still find themselves managing Elastic APM, the ELK stack, and Kibana as distinct products with different configurations and data models. Grafana Cloud was built ground-up for observability: logs, metrics, traces, and profiles share a single UI, common labels, and a unified alert model. When an incident starts, you can pivot between related signals without leaving the screen.

Grafana Cloud includes a native Elasticsearch data source, so your team can start building unified dashboards across Elastic and other tools on day one before migrating a single byte. Many teams run Grafana on top of Elastic for weeks or months before deciding to move log workloads over, which keeps risk low and gives teams time to build confidence.