Making the Most of Grafana Cloud's Free Tier

Grafana Cloud is a fully managed cloud-hosted observability platform ideal for cloud native environments. It's a tightly integrated stack for metrics, logs, and distributed traces. While anyone can download Grafana's open source software and run it, it can be a challenge to setup and maintain the whole stack. Self-hosting becomes even less attractive when you consider Grafana Cloud's wonderful "Free Forever" plan with generous usage limits, such as 50GB for traces with 14-day retention!

Make the most of that free 50GB with TailCtrl – only traces of interest will be sent to Grafana Cloud!

Sending Traces To Grafana Cloud

TailCtrl supports sending traces to observability backends via the OpenTelemetry Protocol (OTLP). Grafana has a wonderful guide for sending data through OTLP to Grafana Cloud. The guide helps you create an Access Policy token with the traces:write scope and provides the OTLP endpoint information you will need to configure TailCtrl. Once you have an Access Policy token and the endpoint information, you can proceed to configuring a TailCtrl exporter.

To configure a TailCtrl exporter, log into your account, and navigate to the "Exporters" page.

Next, click the "Create Exporter" button. Select "otlp" as the Exporter Type, use your Grafana Cloud instance ID as the Username, and your Access Policy token for the Password.

Next, set the OTLP "endpoint" using the information obtained earlier and include the /v1/traces scope at the end. Make sure you select the appropriate Agent Groups to apply the exporter to (this example uses the default group). Click the "Create" button, that's it! TailCtrl agents in the selected groups will receive the new exporter configuration and begin to send sampled traces to Grafana Cloud!