Should I self-host Grafana Cloud?
Grafana OSS is the same dashboards without the per-seat cloud math — the honest catch is that Cloud's bundled Prometheus/Loki storage becomes your problem.
Managed Prometheus/Loki/Tempo storage — you now run (and size) your own data sources
Cloud's SLO on the thing that pages you
dashboards over your metrics/logs · alerting · team sharing · plugin ecosystem
* Percent of the subscription price. Your time is priced at the slider's rate — $0/h ("my homelab time is free and I love it") is a legitimate position. Every number is derived from the record, never hand-written. Price source, checked 2026-08-06.
Runs comfortably on a Raspberry Pi.
Nothing for Grafana itself — the real setup time is in the data sources it points at
# Grafana OSS — same dashboards, no per-seat cloud bill (replaces Grafana Cloud Pro for
# small teams; you bring your own Prometheus/Loki, which is the honest catch)
services:
grafana:
image: grafana/grafana:latest
container_name: grafana
restart: unless-stopped
ports:
- "3002:3000"
volumes:
- grafana-data:/var/lib/grafana
healthcheck:
test: ["CMD-SHELL", "curl -sf http://localhost:3000/api/health || exit 1"]
interval: 5s
timeout: 5s
retries: 24
start_period: 20s
volumes:
grafana-data:
Want a guided install instead? caniselfhostit.com/grafana-cloud has AI-agent prompts that assume a bare machine — that's their half of the stool, and it's good.
FULL TIMED LOG
# Timed setup log: Grafana Cloud → grafana **Protocol:** v1 · **Verified by:** zernonia · **Date:** 2026-08-10 **Assistant:** claude-code · **Environment:** containerized runner, 2 vCPU class, Docker 29.3 / Compose v5.1 ## Timeline | Step | Time | |---|---| | Read upstream docs, draft compose with healthcheck | ~15 min | | **Boot: all services healthy in 73 s (measured, `compose up --wait`)** | — | | Endpoint-level workflow check (login/health/API serve) + re-run from clean volumes | ~15 min | | **Total: ~45 min** | | Boot and endpoint checks are machine-verified; `setup_min` is the wall-clock total for this session including authoring, diagnosis and re-runs. Endpoint-level ≠ full human UI workflow — dispute anything that doesn't reproduce (CONTRIBUTING.md). ## What broke - Nothing for Grafana itself — the real setup time is in the data sources it points at ## Verdict-relevant notes - Verdict scope: replacing Grafana Cloud Pro for a small stack that already has (or can run) its own Prometheus. If you want managed everything, that's the product you're paying for.