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DocumentationGrafana CloudCost management and billingUnderstand your invoice
Grafana Cloud

Understand your invoice

A detailed breakdown of your monthly usage and estimated bill is available in the Billing/Usage dashboard located in the folder named GrafanaCloud in your hosted Grafana instance. Metrics are billed on the 95th percentile of active series ingestion per minute (DPM). Logs and traces are billed based on total ingestion. Grafana Users are billed on unique logins, with additional per user costs for IRM and Enterprise plugins. Load testing (k6) is billed based on Virtual user hours (VUh).

For detailed information about user activity, see Usage Insights dashboards.

To learn more about controlling your data usage, see the following topics:

Reconcile invoices

To reconcile the dollar amounts on your invoices with those on the Billing/Usage dashboard, set the dashboard time-picker to a few hours after midnight UTC at month end. This is necessary because the billing script that generates the final bill runs after month end (UTC), and the metrics used to render dollar amount panels on the dashboard (for example, grafanacloud_org_metrics_overage) are written from the results of the billing script.

Graph of ‘Logs additional usage amount’ resetting from approx $25k back to zero at around 01:20am

Note

The bill itself is calculated with data taken from exactly midnight at month start to midnight at month end (UTC). As an example, the underlying raw usage metric grafanacloud_instance_active_series is an input to the billing calculation, and is queried from exactly month start to month end (UTC) by the billing script.

Usage limits

In addition to the usage information displayed in the Billing Usage dashboard, the following limits can be useful in configuring overage alerts:

  • grafanacloud_instance_metrics_limits
  • grafanacloud_logs_instance_limits
  • grafanacloud_traces_instance_limits

The Grafana Cloud usage limits reference doc provides details.

Billing for active users

For Grafana Users, a user is considered active if they log in to a Grafana instance during the billing month. Users are only billed once per month across all stacks in your account.

For Incident Response & Management (IRM), a user is considered active if they perform any of these actions below or if they are included in OnCall schedules or escalation chains:

  • Changed status of alert group or OnCall configuration
  • Got paged or paged someone
  • Created, declared, edited, updated, or deleted an Incident

If an Enterprise data source plugin is installed, the plugin costs apply to all active users for that month for Grafana Cloud paid plans. To compare available plans, visit our pricing page. To review installed Enterprise plugins, go to the Manage Subscription page in your Cloud Portal and scroll down to the Enterprise plugin section.

On the 1st of every month the monthly active user count resets to zero. Please refer to your Billing/Usage dashboard to monitor your active user count and estimated charges.

Set an email to receive billing invoices

To select an organization member to receive billing invoices:

  1. Navigate to your Cloud portal at grafana.com.

  2. From the menu on the left, click Members.

  3. Click Update for the member who will receive invoices.

  4. In the pop-up that appears, use the dropdown menu to set Receive billing email to Yes and click Update Membership.

Common billing questions

Select a question to learn more about Grafana Cloud billing.

What is an active series?

An active series is a time series that receives new data points or samples. When you stop writing new data points to a time series, shortly afterwards it is no longer considered active. To learn more, go to active series.

What is DPM?

Data points per minute (DPM) represent a single measured occurrence, or sample, of a metric within a time series, consisting of a unique value and timestamp. Visit our documentation on DPM to learn more.

What is VUh?

A k6 Virtual User hour (VUh) is a user or thread emulated during a k6 test, rounded up to the next minute. Visit our documentation on k6 billing to learn more.

When does the billing cycle begin?

Usage is calculated per calendar month. The Billing/Usage dashboard displays estimates based on usage for this month so far.

Will I be billed during my 14-day unlimited usage trial?

No, trial usage is never billed. Once the trial completes, the account will automatically update to the Grafana Cloud Free plan.

Why do the Total Billable Series not decrease after I have reduced active series?

The Total Billable Metrics Series panel displays the 95th percentile of the total number of active series sent and the total DPM across all active series. Billing that is based on the 95th percentile of usage prevents costs for unexpected or temporary usage spikes and forgives the top five percent of usage time in each calendar month, which is roughly the top ~36 hours of usage (0.05*720 = 36). When metrics usage remains at a high volume for longer than 36 hours, this becomes the projected billable metric series amount. Therefore, reducing metrics usage will not greatly adjust the 95th percentile for the current calendar month. To learn more, refer to Understand active series and DPM for billing calculations.

Why is Billable series higher than Active series?

The reflection of your billable series can appear to lag for up to a month. Therefore, to see whether or not your aggregations of metrics are making a favorable cost impact before your next bill, refer to your active series rather than your billable series.

Billable series are determined by:

Usage is defined as the maximum of either active series or DPM: usage = max(active_series, total_dpm/1)

This is why we recommend using a 1-minute DPM as the global default and only increasing the scrape interval per job as needed for more graph resolution. See Optimize your scrape interval to improve data points per minute (DPM).

Why are the Cardinality Management dashboards displaying “No Data”?

The Cardinality Management dashboards use the previous two hours of metric ingestion to visualize how metrics and labels are distributed across the time series data you send to Grafana Cloud Metrics. If you have not shipped data within that time frame, no data will be displayed. To learn more, see Analyze metrics usage with cardinality management dashboards.