Grafana Cloud

If this were a book, this page is the table of contents. Each Part below is a chapter; each chapter links out to Grafana product notes and this wiki’s existing concept treatments — PromQL, Mimir, Loki, Tempo, cardinality, SLOs — instead of duplicating them. Chapters are numbered per Part and restart at 1 in every Part. Chapters not yet written are marked — _(stub)_.

Parts

00 — Platform Foundations

The product surface every later Part assumes: what Grafana Cloud is versus OSS/Enterprise, how an organization’s stacks/users/RBAC are structured, and how to navigate the UI day to day.

Chapter 1 — Introduction to Grafana Cloud — (stub)
Chapter 2 — Organizations & Stack Management — (stub)
Chapter 3 — Grafana User Interface — (stub)

01 — Telemetry Collection

How telemetry actually gets into Grafana Cloud. Alloy is genuinely new ground for this wiki — every existing mention of it elsewhere is a passing reference, not a treatment — while the OpenTelemetry data model itself is already covered in depth in Instrumentation.

Chapter 1 — Grafana Alloy — (stub)
Chapter 2 — OpenTelemetry Integration — (stub) — see OpenTelemetry SDKs & Semantic Conventions and Auto vs. Manual Instrumentation for the vendor-neutral depth this chapter builds on
Chapter 3 — Integrations — (stub)

02 — Metrics (Grafana Mimir)

Grafana Cloud’s hosted metrics backend and the language for querying it. PromQL is already a full, deep Part elsewhere in this wiki — this Part links into it rather than re-teaching the language, and owns the Mimir-as-a-product and cost/cardinality layers instead.

Chapter 1 — Grafana Mimir — (stub) — see Mimir for the architecture, multi-tenancy, and limits already written up
Chapter 2 — PromQL — (stub) — see PromQL Masterclass for the full query-language treatment this chapter should not duplicate
Chapter 3 — Metrics Management — (stub) — see Cardinality for the cardinality math and mitigation hierarchy

03 — Logs (Grafana Loki)

Grafana Cloud’s log aggregation backend and its query language, building on the architecture already written up in Loki.

Chapter 1 — Grafana Loki — (stub) — see Loki for the streams-not-documents model and ingestion-agent landscape
Chapter 2 — LogQL — (stub)
Chapter 3 — Log Management — (stub) — see Log Aggregation for the vendor-neutral schema-on-read framing

04 — Traces & Continuous Profiling

Distributed tracing and continuous profiling as Grafana Cloud products, and the cross-signal navigation that ties metrics, logs, traces, and profiles into one investigation flow.

Chapter 1 — Grafana Tempo — (stub) — see Tempo for the no-index architecture and a worked TraceQL example
Chapter 2 — Grafana Pyroscope — (stub) — see Continuous Profiling for the vendor-neutral concept this chapter adds the Pyroscope product layer to
Chapter 3 — Correlations — (stub)

05 — Visualization & Alerting

The day-to-day surface for looking at and reacting to telemetry — dashboards, ad hoc exploration, unified alerting, and sharing. Alerting concept and routing depth already lives in observability/; this Part owns the Grafana-specific mechanics (contact points, notification policies, panel/variable design).

Chapter 1 — Dashboards — (stub) — see Dashboard Design for the vendor-neutral design principles this chapter adds Grafana panels/variables/provisioning to
Chapter 2 — Explore & Drilldowns — (stub)
Chapter 3 — Alerting — (stub) — see Alerting & Alert Routing for the concept, and Alertmanager for the grouping/dedup mechanics unified alerting descends from
Chapter 4 — Reporting & Sharing — (stub)

06 — Application Observability

Grafana Cloud’s Application Performance Monitoring layer — automatic service discovery, RED metrics, and the entity/service graph underneath it. Genuinely new product surface, not covered elsewhere in this wiki.

Chapter 1 — Application Observability — (stub)
Chapter 2 — Entity Catalog — (stub)
Chapter 3 — Entity Graph — (stub)
Chapter 4 — Service Graph — (stub) — see Distributed Tracing Backend for the trace-assembly mechanics a service graph is built from

07 — Specialized Monitoring

Monitoring domains that each get their own dedicated Grafana Cloud product: Kubernetes, the browser, synthetic checks, and load testing.

Chapter 1 — Kubernetes Monitoring — (stub) — see Kubernetes → Observability for the cluster-native metrics/logging/tracing chapters this Part adds the Grafana Cloud product layer to (both currently stubs — there’s no written depth to link into on either side yet)
Chapter 2 — Frontend Observability — (stub)
Chapter 3 — Synthetic Monitoring — (stub)
Chapter 4 — k6 Performance Testing — (stub)

08 — Reliability Engineering

Grafana’s SRE product suite — SLO tracking, incident management, on-call scheduling, and IRM — layered on top of the SLI/SLO/error-budget theory already written up in observability/.

Chapter 1 — Grafana SLO — (stub) — see SLOs & Error Budgets for the SLI/SLO/error-budget/burn-rate concepts this chapter adds the Grafana Cloud SLO app to
Chapter 2 — Grafana Incident — (stub)
Chapter 3 — Grafana OnCall — (stub)
Chapter 4 — Incident Response & Management (IRM) — (stub)

09 — Developer Experience & Platform Engineering

Treating Grafana Cloud itself as code: the gcx CLI, the REST APIs underneath it, the Terraform provider, and GitOps for dashboards/alerting. gcx already covers the CLI command surface and token model in depth — this Part’s GCX chapter should extend that note rather than restate it.

Chapter 1 — GCX CLI — (stub) — see gcx for the full command-surface reference, OSS/Enterprise/Cloud/BYOC matrix, and token model already written up
Chapter 2 — Grafana Cloud APIs — (stub)
Chapter 3 — Terraform Provider — (stub)
Chapter 4 — Observability as Code — (stub) — see gcx‘s Resource GitOps section and GitOps for the pattern this chapter applies to Grafana Cloud resources specifically

10 — Administration & Governance

The governance layer: security and access, cost control, agent fleet management, AI-assisted operations, and the naming/folder standards that keep a shared Grafana Cloud org from decaying into chaos.

Chapter 1 — Security — (stub)
Chapter 2 — Billing & Cost Management — (stub) — see Cardinality for the active-series/samples-per-second billing model already written up
Chapter 3 — Adaptive Telemetry — (stub) — see Cardinality for the mitigation hierarchy (drop, aggregate, sample) Adaptive Telemetry automates
Chapter 4 — Fleet Management — (stub)
Chapter 5 — Grafana Assistant — (stub) — see gcx, Grafana Skills, and Grafana MCP for the three existing notes this chapter should tie together rather than duplicate
Chapter 6 — Platform Governance — (stub) — see Multi-tenancy for the isolation-vs-fairness framing underneath naming/folder/tenancy standards

11 — Enterprise Architectures

Full reference architectures for running Grafana Cloud alongside the major clouds and Kubernetes, plus the production and troubleshooting playbooks a Principal/Staff candidate is expected to reason from.

Chapter 1 — Azure Reference Architecture — (stub)
Chapter 2 — AWS Reference Architecture — (stub)
Chapter 3 — Kubernetes Platform Architecture — (stub)
Chapter 4 — Hybrid & Multi-Cloud — (stub)
Chapter 5 — Production Best Practices — (stub)
Chapter 6 — Troubleshooting Playbook — (stub)

12 — Appendices

Quick-reference material — CLI/API/query-language cheat sheets, pattern catalogs, and certification/interview prep — mirroring how prometheus/ represents its own appendices as a trailing Part rather than a separate construct.

Chapter 1 — CLI & Utilities Reference — (stub) — see gcx for the gcx portion of this table already written up
Chapter 2 — Query Language Cheat Sheets — (stub) — see PromQL Cheat Sheet for the PromQL half of this table already written up
Chapter 3 — Grafana Cloud APIs Reference — (stub)
Chapter 4 — Observability Patterns — (stub)
Chapter 5 — Reference Architectures — (stub)
Chapter 6 — Certification & Interview Preparation — (stub)

Metadata


Author	Amit Singh
Scope	grafana-cloud