Managed Grafana Hosting — production-ready from $15 a month
Analytics and interactive visualization platform. Deployed on your own dedicated instance in AWS, Azure, or GCP, kept patched, backed up, and monitored by ManageStacks — standard Grafana, no lock-in.
Grafana on ManageStacks is the self-hosted, open-source Grafana OSS deployed to your own AWS, Azure, or GCP region — priced flat at $29 per instance per month instead of per-active-user like Grafana Cloud or Datadog, with unlimited dashboards, unlimited users, all 100+ data-source plugins, and pre-configured infrastructure dashboards. Your query metadata and alerting rules stay in your cloud.
100+ data sources · Unified Alerting
What does Grafana do, and why do teams deploy it?
Grafana is the leading open-source platform for monitoring and observability. It enables you to query, visualise, alert on, and understand metrics from any data source. Grafana supports 100+ built-in data sources (Prometheus, InfluxDB, Elasticsearch, PostgreSQL, CloudWatch, Loki, Tempo) and has a rich ecosystem of community plugins for the rest.
Used by millions at organisations of every size, Grafana is the default for creating dashboards that bring together infrastructure, application, and business metrics in one place. It's the observability layer, not the data store — you point it at your existing metric backends and it renders.
Self-hosting Grafana OSS at production scale means running the Grafana binary + a Postgres or MySQL database for dashboards/users/alerts + persistent storage for plugins + SSL + a plan for the alerting-rule DB migrations that happen between major versions. ManageStacks handles the operational shell so your team focuses on dashboards, not the box under them.
- Interactive dashboards with rich panel library and templating
- 100+ built-in data sources (Prometheus, Loki, InfluxDB, CloudWatch, PostgreSQL)
- Unified alerting engine with multi-channel notifications (Slack, PagerDuty, email, webhook)
- Templated dashboards, variables, and repeatable panels
- Role-based access control (Viewer / Editor / Admin) with team assignments
- Annotations and event correlation across dashboards
Analytics and interactive visualization platform
What does managed Grafana hosting cost?
Flat per-app pricing, in your chosen AWS, Azure, or GCP region. No per-user pricing — a busy deployment costs the same as a quiet one.
Starter
Staging and internal tools. Dedicated instance, TLS, daily backups, managed upgrades.
Standard
Production workloads. Adds monitoring, staging environment, region choice, priority support.
Business
High-traffic and compliance workloads. Adds a high-availability replica and same-day support.
24×7 SRE retainer
Round-the-clock on-call across every hosted application, for teams that need a pager answered at 3am.
Self-hosting Grafana vs managed — what does it really cost?
The software is free. The engineer-hours are not.
Running it yourself
- Install Grafana + Postgres on an EC2 box; configure grafana.ini and provisioning YAML by hand
- Set up SSL, DNS, and reverse proxy separately
- Handle plugin storage and version compatibility yourself
- Test major-version upgrades (9→10→11) manually; migrate alerting-rule schema
- Build HA yourself — two Grafana replicas, shared Postgres, session-affinity load balancer
On ManageStacks
- Subscribe through your AWS, Azure, or GCP marketplace
- Grafana comes up with Postgres, persistent storage, SSL, and infrastructure dashboards pre-installed
- New Grafana versions arrive as one-click updates after we validate the DB migration
- Daily encrypted Postgres backups + object-storage plugin persistence run in the background
- HA-mode replicas + shared backend available on Business plans
Grafana on ManageStacks vs the alternatives
How Grafana OSS on ManageStacks compares to Grafana Cloud and the two dominant APM SaaS alternatives on architectural properties.
| Grafana OSS on ManageStacks | Grafana Cloud | Datadog | New Relic | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Deployment | Managed on your AWS, Azure, or GCP | Vendor-hosted | Vendor-hosted | Vendor-hosted |
| Data residency | Your cloud region | Vendor infrastructure | Vendor infrastructure | Vendor infrastructure |
| Pricing basis | Flat per instance | Per active user + per metric ingested | Per host + per metric + per feature | Per user + per GB ingested |
| User limit | Unlimited | Metered by tier | By tier | By tier |
| Open source | Yes (Apache 2.0) | Yes (Apache, hosted) | No (proprietary) | No (proprietary) |
| Alerting included | Unified Alerting included | Included | Included | Included |
Provisioning, upgrades, backups and monitoring on your team’s plate.
What does running Grafana yourself involve?
ManageStacks deploys Grafana OSS with persistent storage, SSL, a Postgres backing database, and pre-configured data-source templates for Prometheus, Loki, and CloudWatch. We include ready-made dashboards for infrastructure monitoring, handle version upgrades and internal DB migrations, and manage plugin storage and HA setup on higher plans.
Grafana key numbers
How long from subscribing to a live instance?
Subscribe
Subscribe to ManageStacks through your AWS, Azure, or GCP marketplace.
Provision
Grafana OSS comes up with Postgres backing DB, persistent storage, SSL, and pre-configured Prometheus/Loki/CloudWatch data-source templates — typically 3-5 minutes.
Connect data
Add your data sources (metric backends, log stores, cloud APIs) through the UI or provisioning YAML. Import Grafana Labs' community dashboards for common stacks.
Alert
Configure notification channels (Slack, PagerDuty, email), build alert rules, and start receiving pages. Backups and updates keep running in the background.
When is self-hosting Grafana the right answer instead?
“Managed hosting is not always the correct call.”
Self-host when a platform team already runs the infrastructure and on-call rotation to operate Grafana at genuinely low marginal cost. Self-host when compliance requires an air-gapped or on-premises deployment that no hosted option can satisfy. And self-host when the deployment depends on heavy customisation with a fast internal build-deploy loop, because an internal release process will beat any managed change process.
For everyone else — teams whose engineers have better things to do than shepherd upgrades — managed hosting is cheaper than the hours it replaces.
Which cloud should Grafana run on — AWS, Azure or GCP?
For most workloads, the choice of cloud matters less than proximity: run Grafana in the same cloud and region as the applications and data it talks to, because every request between them adds a round trip. The underlying compute performs equivalently across AWS, Azure, and GCP.
In practice, an existing cloud footprint decides it. All plans support all three clouds, and moving regions later is a scheduled migration, not a rebuild.
Deepest managed-service catalog, default when there's no existing footprint
Best fit for teams already on Microsoft 365 or Entra ID
Strongest for data/analytics-adjacent workloads
Every plan supports AWS, Azure, and GCP — region choice included.
Common questions about Grafana on ManageStacks
How long does it take to deploy Grafana on ManageStacks?
Under 5 minutes. ManageStacks provisions Grafana with persistent storage, SSL, a Postgres backing database, and pre-configured data-source templates for Prometheus, Loki, and CloudWatch. Add your data sources through the UI or via provisioning YAML.
How does this compare to Grafana Cloud?
Grafana Cloud is the vendor-hosted offering with a free tier and paid tiers priced per active user + per metric ingested. ManageStacks is a flat $29 per instance regardless of user count or query volume. For teams beyond ~10-15 active users, self-hosted on ManageStacks is materially cheaper — and metrics/logs stay in your infrastructure, which matters if you're pushing sensitive data into your observability layer.
Can I install custom Grafana plugins on ManageStacks?
Yes. Install plugins from the Grafana catalog through the UI, via the grafana-cli, or by uploading signed custom plugins. ManageStacks provides persistent storage so plugins survive restarts and updates. Signed plugins install by default; unsigned plugins need an explicit allowlist for security.
Does ManageStacks handle Grafana version upgrades?
Yes. We test each Grafana release for stability and handle the internal database migrations that happen between major versions (Grafana 9 → 10 → 11 all involved schema changes). One-click apply once we've validated your dashboards render correctly against the new version.
How is HA/high-availability handled?
Grafana OSS supports HA via a shared database backend and shared plugin storage. On Business plans we provision this by default — 2+ Grafana replicas behind a load balancer with a shared Postgres and object-storage-backed plugin directory. Session state stays consistent across replicas.
Are alerting and OnCall included?
Yes — Grafana OSS Unified Alerting (the default alerting engine as of Grafana 8) is included. Grafana OnCall (open-source incident routing / on-call rota) can be added as a separate app on the same deployment for organisations that want everything in one place.
Can I use Grafana Enterprise features?
ManageStacks ships Grafana OSS. Grafana Enterprise features (SAML SSO with role mapping, reporting, LDAP sync, enterprise data sources like ServiceNow) require a licence from Grafana Labs — bring your own licence and we'll enable them on the deployment.
What happens to my dashboards and alerts if I leave?
Full export — dashboards as JSON (via the API or UI), alert rules as YAML (Grafana provisioning format), users and teams as a Postgres dump. Grafana OSS is Apache-licensed, so you can spin it up anywhere. Migration off is a supported operation.
Run Grafana without carrying the pager
Subscribe through your AWS, Azure, or GCP marketplace. We handle provisioning, SSL, monitoring, backups, updates, and security. From $15/mo.