Cost savings Grafana Cloud follow up

In the previous post I wrote about our efforts reduce cost for Grafana Cloud metrics. Here I went over the 3 main things we implemented

• Reduced sample rates
• Filter/drop unused metrics (keep only used ones)
• Enable adaptive metrics

but I also ended up concluding that we lacked impact feedback and only had proxy indicators. Our goal was ambitious and more concrete we set out to save 80% on our metrics bill. This post serves as a conclusion on our efforts.

Conclusion

We now know that we almost reached that goal with a 78% reduction in metrics cost alone.

Implementation aftermath

Enabling auto-mode for adaptive metrics was by far the most invasive and we saw some of the developers dashboards break, but also fewer than antisipated.