Skip to content

ADR-0002: Abandon Grafana Cloud

Status: Accepted
Date: 2026-05-12
Deciders: Team

Context

Grafana Cloud was in use for metrics and log monitoring. As the product scales toward SaaS, the platform's pricing and feature tiers became inadequate.

  • Enterprise plan: starts at $25k/year, excludes plugins
  • Pro plan: $20/user/month — only 13 months of metrics retention and 30 days of log retention

Neither tier is cost-effective or feature-complete for a SaaS company requiring long-term observability data.

Decision

Abandon Grafana Cloud. Migrate monitoring infrastructure to a self-managed or third-party-managed alternative.

Alternatives Considered

  • Stay on Pro plan — ruled out: retention limits (13 months metrics, 30 days logs) insufficient for SaaS compliance and incident retrospectives.
  • Upgrade to Enterprise — ruled out: $25k/year base cost without plugins is not justifiable at current stage.

Consequences

  • Grafana Cloud subscription to be cancelled.
  • Monitoring stack temporarily without a permanent home until replacement is decided.
  • When a replacement is chosen, a new ADR should be created referencing this one.