Grafana Labs is announcing new Grafana Cloud capabilities designed for Kubernetes platform teams seeking to reduce cloud costs and gain more unified monitoring experiences across their entire cloud native infrastructure.

“Kubernetes leveled up platform engineering and redefined how global distributed teams could access shared infrastructure – but teams have to use multiple different platforms to cover the full breadth of cost monitoring, system health, incident management and related K8s infrastructure concerns,” said Tom Wilkie, Grafana Labs CTO and CNCF Governing Board member. “We believe that Grafana Cloud, our fully managed offering that makes it easier to get started with observability and includes a generous forever-free tier, gives platform teams more insight under one roof than any other observability tool for Kubernetes environments.”

With Kubernetes Monitoring, the solution introduced to the fully managed Grafana Cloud observability platform last year, users can automatically ship metrics to Grafana Cloud after installing the Grafana Agent into one or more Kubernetes clusters. Once this connection is made, Grafana Cloud users have out-of-the-box access to their Kubernetes metrics, logs, and events via prebuilt dashboards and alerts. The latest updates include:

Cost monitoring: This feature, which leverages the CNCF sandbox project OpenCost, allows platform teams to measure infrastructure spend on Kubernetes deployments – breaking down costs to nodes, persistent volumes, and load balancers – across multi-cloud environments.
Out-of-the-Box Kubernetes Traces: Grafana Cloud is experimenting with adding the possibility of scraping traces for Kubernetes clusters. Data can be then sent to Grafana Tempo for visualization. Rather than jumping between different Kubernetes infrastructure components to find out “what happened” in complex incident resolution scenarios, Grafana Cloud would allow platform teams to trace specific Kubernetes events from start to finish with a simple agent install.
Kubernetes Monitoring landing page: Grafana Cloud’s new Kubernetes Monitoring landing page further reduces context switching for platform teams by bringing all of the most pressing issues you might have in your Kubernetes infrastructure to the surface automatically, in a single, predefined view.
Simplified Helm installation: Grafana Cloud’s new Helm installation makes it easy to install the Kubernetes Monitoring solution and get started scraping Kubernetes metrics, logs, and traces. It’s open source, any platform team can run it with the Grafana Agent, and it ships with basic configurations for what you want it to include.
Easy monitoring of services running on your Kubernetes fleet: Kubernetes Monitoring in Grafana Cloud includes out-of-the-box integrations that come with prebuilt dashboards, rules, and alerts for Aerospike, Apache ActiveMQ, Cilium, CoreDNS, etcd, NGINX, GitLab, Apache Kafka, CockroachDB, Apache Cassandra, PostgreSQL, MySQL. Grafana Cloud has bundled all of these integrations into a single solution themed for various monitoring use cases.

This announcement comes in advance of KubeCon + CloudNativeCon, taking place November 6-9 in Chicago. These new developments will be featured at the Grafana Labs KubeCon booth (#C18).