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Alex Spinov
Alex Spinov

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Grafana Cloud Has a Free Tier — Metrics, Logs, Traces, and Dashboards Without Running Infrastructure

#devops #api #tutorial #webdev

Running Prometheus, Grafana, Loki, and Tempo yourself means managing 4+ servers just to watch your other servers. It is monitoring infrastructure for your infrastructure.

Grafana Cloud gives you all of this managed for free — 10,000 metrics, 50GB logs, 50GB traces. Pre-built dashboards for Kubernetes, Docker, Node.js, and more.

What You Get for Free

  • 10,000 active metrics — Prometheus-compatible
  • 50 GB logs — Loki-compatible
  • 50 GB traces — Tempo-compatible
  • 500 VUh k6 testing — load testing included
  • 14-day retention — metrics, logs, traces
  • Pre-built dashboards — 100+ templates
  • Alerting — email, Slack, PagerDuty, webhook
  • 3 users — team access

Quick Start

1. Sign Up

Sign up at grafana.com/cloud, get your stack URL and API key.

2. Send Metrics (Prometheus Remote Write) 

# prometheus.yml
remote_write:
  - url: https://prometheus-us-central1.grafana.net/api/prom/push
    basic_auth:
      username: YOUR_USER_ID
      password: YOUR_API_KEY
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3. Send Metrics (Node.js with OpenTelemetry) 

npm install @opentelemetry/sdk-node @opentelemetry/exporter-metrics-otlp-http
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import { OTLPMetricExporter } from "@opentelemetry/exporter-metrics-otlp-http";

const exporter = new OTLPMetricExporter({
  url: "https://otlp-gateway-prod-us-central-0.grafana.net/otlp/v1/metrics",
  headers: {
    Authorization: `Basic ${btoa(`YOUR_USER_ID:YOUR_API_KEY`)}`,
  },
});
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4. Send Logs (Loki) 

curl -X POST "https://logs-prod-us-central1.grafana.net/loki/api/v1/push" \
  -u "YOUR_USER_ID:YOUR_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "streams": [{
      "stream": {"app": "myapp", "env": "prod"},
      "values": [["'$(date +%s)000000000'", "User login successful"]]
    }]
  }'
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5. Grafana Alloy Agent (Easiest Setup) 

# Install Grafana Alloy — collects metrics, logs, traces automatically
brew install grafana/grafana/alloy
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Alloy auto-discovers services, scrapes metrics, tails log files, and sends everything to Grafana Cloud. One agent replaces Prometheus + Promtail + OTEL Collector.

Pre-Built Dashboards

Import dashboards with one click:

  • Node.js — event loop lag, memory, GC, HTTP request duration
  • Docker — container CPU, memory, network, disk
  • Kubernetes — pod status, resource usage, node health
  • PostgreSQL — connections, queries, replication lag
  • Nginx — requests/sec, error rates, response times

Real-World Use Case

A solo developer running 3 side projects told me: "I was paying $50/month for Datadog just to have basic dashboards. Switched to Grafana Cloud free tier — same dashboards, better log search with Loki, and I even got distributed tracing. My monitoring bill went to $0."

Free Plan Limits

Feature Free Tier
Metrics 10,000 active series
Logs 50 GB
Traces 50 GB
k6 testing 500 VUh
Retention 14 days
Users 3
Dashboards Unlimited
Alerts Yes

The Bottom Line

If you are running anything in production without monitoring — you are guessing. Grafana Cloud free tier gives you the same stack that companies pay thousands for, with zero infrastructure to manage.

Need to monitor your scraping pipelines? Check out my web scraping tools on Apify — built-in monitoring, retries, and error alerts.

Building something custom? Email me at spinov001@gmail.com

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