Managed Grafana
Last reviewed by Tyler Eastridge
AceMQ operates Grafana OSS or Grafana Enterprise for you: the servers and their database, alerting, plugins, SSO, upgrades and the pager. We run it in your own cloud account, Kubernetes cluster or data centre (Tier 3), or on infrastructure AceMQ runs (Tier 4). Your teams keep building dashboards. If Grafana Cloud or Amazon Managed Grafana already fits, the table below says so.
Support quotes answered within 1 hour, by a senior engineer.
Planning a build, upgrade or migration instead? See AceMQ Grafana consulting and services.
Customers
Partners
What's Included
No add-on pricing for incidents. No per-ticket charges. One contract covers the whole surface.
We run Grafana as two or more instances behind a load balancer, with a shared PostgreSQL or MySQL database instead of the default SQLite file, and the image renderer as its own service. We back up the database, test the restore and size it for the dashboards, users and alert state you actually have.
Alert rules, notification policies, contact points and mute timings are monitored as one pipeline, not as separate screens. We configure high availability between instances, send a test notification to every contact point after each change, and page on the thing that matters most: Grafana no longer evaluating rules.
We keep dashboards, folders, data sources and alert rules in your repository, applied by file provisioning, Terraform or the Grafana Operator, and agree per folder which ones the UI may edit. Provisioning drift is how a repository stops describing production, so we check for it on a schedule.
We read each release against your plugins, data sources and provisioned content, rehearse the upgrade on a copy of the database, write the rollback down and run it in an agreed window. Security releases for the exact version you run are tracked and applied.
SAML, OIDC or LDAP sign-in, including Microsoft Entra ID, team and role mapping from your identity provider, folder permissions and service accounts. We review who can edit data sources and alert rules, because the usual finding is that everyone can.
Grafana is the data visualization layer over Prometheus, Loki, Tempo, Mimir and Pyroscope, plus Elasticsearch, ClickHouse and SQL databases. We manage the credentials, TLS and proxy settings, and chase a slow panel to the data source behind it, because that is where most slow dashboards are slow.
Why AceMQ
Run managed Grafana in your own account, cluster or data centre (Tier 3) when dashboards and data source credentials must stay inside your boundary, or have AceMQ host it (Tier 4) when you want a working platform and no infrastructure to run. Either way the operator is a Grafana specialist under an AceMQ contract.
AceMQ is not a Grafana Labs partner or reseller, and not a partner of AWS for Amazon Managed Grafana or of Microsoft for Azure Managed Grafana. When one of them fits better than we do, we say so, and we support the dashboards and alert rules on them at Tier 1 or 2.
AceMQ holds the contract, the SLA and the escalation path, and brings in partner Grafana specialists as the work needs them. The 15-minute P1 response is a response time, not a resolution time, and every P1 ends with a written root-cause analysis.
Alerting recovery, data source failure and upgrade runbooks, deployment code and monitoring configuration are maintained as yours. If you move between your infrastructure and ours, or take operations in-house, a current handover pack is ready.
Cloud, Kubernetes, bare metal, hybrid, and air-gapped — including environments where you can't give us outbound network access.
Compared
Grafana Labs, AWS and Microsoft run Grafana inside their own services. AceMQ operates Grafana OSS or Enterprise in your account or ours. These are the differences that decide it, from each provider's own pages as read on 4 November 2026.
| Question | Grafana Cloud | Amazon Managed Grafana | Azure Managed Grafana | AceMQ at Tier 3 or 4 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Who runs Grafana | Grafana Labs runs the stack, including managed metrics, logs and traces backends. | AWS runs the Grafana workspace. You manage users, data sources and content. | Microsoft runs it as an Azure service. | AceMQ engineers run Grafana OSS or Enterprise in your cloud account, cluster or data centre (Tier 3), or on infrastructure we run (Tier 4). |
| Where telemetry and credentials live | In Grafana Cloud's backends, or in data sources you connect to it. | In your AWS data sources, such as CloudWatch and Amazon Managed Service for Prometheus. | In Azure data sources such as Azure Monitor, and others you connect. | Wherever your data sources are. Credentials and dashboards stay inside your boundary at Tier 3. |
| Which versions you get | Grafana Cloud follows a different release cadence from Grafana OSS and Enterprise. | AWS decides which Grafana versions a new workspace can use. | Microsoft decides which versions the service offers. | The version you choose. Self-managed minors are supported for nine months, and the last minor of a major for 15 months. |
| Licence | A Grafana Labs subscription. | Grafana Enterprise is offered on the service; AWS and Grafana Labs set the terms. | Grafana Enterprise is offered on the service; Microsoft and Grafana Labs set the terms. | Grafana OSS is AGPLv3. Grafana Enterprise is a Grafana Labs product, so you hold that licence. AceMQ does not resell it or advise on licensing. |
| How you are charged | A platform fee plus usage: active series, logs and traces written, and users. Enterprise by commitment. | By active users on the workspace, plus the cost of the data sources behind it. | By Microsoft's Azure pricing for the service. Read the current rates on Microsoft's pricing page. | Quote only. Your own infrastructure bill plus an operations fee at Tier 3, or a hosted quote at Tier 4. |
| Who answers when alerting stops | Grafana Labs support, on paid plans, for its products. | AWS support covers the workspace. Rule design and data source faults stay with you. | Microsoft support covers the service. Rule design and data source faults stay with you. | An AceMQ senior engineer on a live bridge within 15 minutes, 24/7, and a written root-cause analysis after every P1. |
Sources: grafana.com pricing, licensing and upgrade guide, grafana.com/go/amazon-managed-grafana and /azure-managed-grafana, read 4 November 2026. Providers change terms, so check them before you commit. Grafana Cloud, Amazon Managed Grafana and Azure Managed Grafana are run by their providers: AceMQ supports the dashboards, alert rules and data sources on them at Tiers 1 and 2, and operates Grafana itself only at Tiers 3 and 4.
The same four tiers cover Kafka, Redis, PostgreSQL and RabbitMQ; the escalation-first option is set out in managed open-source operations.
Support window
Grafana Labs ships a minor release about every other month and supports each one for nine months. Run it yourself and an upgrade falls due about every nine months, on the vendor's schedule, not yours. These are the dates in Grafana's table as read on 4 November 2026.
Released 14 April 2026. Any 13.0 instance is about two months from the end of patch support, and 13.1 follows on 20 March 2027.
13.2 is supported to 18 May 2027 and 13.3 to 20 July 2027. Landing on the newest minor buys the longest runway.
The last minor of a major gets 15 months, so 12.4 outlasts 13.0, 13.1 and 13.2. Staying on it is a legitimate choice if plugins or provisioned content are not ready for 13.
Grafana's table marks them as not supported. Estates still there need a rehearsed path to a supported minor, not a date.
AceMQ plans every Tier 3 and Tier 4 upgrade against this table, and the support page covers estates that have already fallen out of the window. Grafana support, Tiers 1 and 2
Alerting
Two Grafana instances behind a load balancer do not make alerting highly available by themselves. These are the behaviours from Grafana's high availability guide that a managed service has to configure and watch.
By default each instance evaluates all alert rules, so evaluation is duplicated. The Alertmanagers inside the instances coordinate so that notifications are not sent twice. A single-node evaluation setting exists for when you want one instance to do the evaluating.
Instances list each other with ha_peers and gossip silences and notifications over port 9094, TCP and UDP. A firewall or network policy that blocks it leaves two Alertmanagers that never talk. Redis is a supported alternative to the gossip layer.
Notification and silence state is persisted periodically and on graceful shutdown, which is one more reason the shared database must be backed up and its restore tested.
Grafana's guide says the Alertmanager chooses availability over consistency, so an occasional duplicate or out-of-order notification is expected. We tune grouping so that costs a second message, not a second page.
Sources: Grafana documentation, configure high availability for Grafana Alerting, read 4 November 2026. Grafana support options and the nine-month window
Dashboards as code
Dashboards in Git are only useful if production matches them. We settle the rules before the first folder is provisioned.
Folders owned by the repository are read-only to editors; scratch folders stay editable and are never alerted on. Provisioned dashboards use the provisioning provider's allowUiUpdates setting to allow or refuse UI saves.
Alert rules, notification policies and contact points are provisioned alongside dashboards, so a rebuilt instance comes back with its paging intact.
We compare what the instance holds with what the repository describes and tell you what differs, instead of letting the two diverge until the next upgrade.
Data source credentials come from your secrets backend or environment, not from provisioning files committed to Git.
Ownership
The line is written into the contract so that nobody finds it during an incident.
Grafana instances, the backing database and its backups, plugins, SSO configuration, version upgrades, monitoring of the alerting pipeline and the pager.
What a dashboard shows, what an alert rule means and who is on the rota behind a contact point. Your engineers merge changes through your own pipeline.
When a dashboard is slow because of a query, a template variable or a data source, we find the cause and tell you which panel. Rewriting it is yours, or a consulting engagement.
Helm values, Terraform, runbooks and monitoring configuration live in your repository. Taking Grafana back in-house, or moving between tiers, leaves nothing to unpick.
Price drivers
AceMQ does not publish a price list for managed services. A managed Grafana quote is built from these inputs, and the written quote returns within 1 hour of your request.
How many Grafana instances, production and non-production, how many organisations and users, and whether alerting runs in high availability.
How many data sources and alert rules sit behind it, and how much of the content is provisioned from code.
From business hours to 24/7 on-call with the 15-minute P1 response.
At Tier 3 you pay your cloud provider for infrastructure and AceMQ for operations. At Tier 4 the infrastructure is part of the AceMQ quote. If you run Grafana Enterprise, its licence is held by you and is not part of an AceMQ price.
Not a fit for
We would rather say so up front.
AceMQ is a specialist service with a contract and senior engineers, not a self-service console. If you want a workspace in minutes, Grafana Cloud, Amazon Managed Grafana or Azure Managed Grafana is the better fit.
If a single team owns a modest estate inside one cloud and has no residency or cost reason to leave the provider's service, the provider's service is less to run than anything we build.
A managed platform keeps Grafana healthy. Designing the dashboards, or fixing the queries behind slow ones, is consulting work and can be scoped separately.
Managed Grafana does not cover the Prometheus, Loki or Elasticsearch behind it. They have their own managed pages and support contracts.
Running Prometheus too? Managed Grafana and managed Prometheus can sit under one contract. Managed Prometheus
Escalation Path
Every tier reaches a senior Grafana engineer. There is no tier-1 triage layer to get through.
P1 escalation path
A replay of one P1, from the first page to the written root-cause analysis
15-minute P1 response, 24/7.
A response time, not a resolution time.
P1 opened, on-call engineer paged
Phone, email or Slack reaches the on-call senior engineer directly, whether the incident is in RabbitMQ, Kafka, Redis, PostgreSQL or Kubernetes. No web form, no tier-1 queue.
Senior engineer on your bridge
A senior engineer who already knows your environment joins a live bridge, so nobody has to re-explain your topology.
Specialists across the stack join
When an incident crosses components, the engineers who know each one join. For RabbitMQ, the path runs to the core team.
Written root-cause analysis
Root cause, the fix applied and the prevention steps, delivered after every P1.
Typical engagements
Grafana support work from AceMQ. Each card links to the full write-up: the dashboard and alerting estate, what AceMQ diagnosed or changed, and the result.
Global Aviation Technology Provider
Troubleshooting cluster failover, partition handling, and quorum queue issues in a high-stakes aviation operational environment.
RabbitMQ
KubernetesQuorum Queues
Prometheus
GrafanaGlobal Telecom Leader
Resolving weekly RabbitMQ crashes, optimizing for 300,000+ connected devices, and architecting horizontal scaling strategy.
RabbitMQKubernetesQuorum QueuesPrometheusGrafanaTelecommunications Operator
Remediation of a Grafana deployment that became unusable during incidents, with dashboards timing out exactly when engineers needed them most.
GrafanaPrometheusKubernetes
PostgreSQLEnergy Utility Operator
Ongoing support for Grafana unified alerting, notification routing, and datasource reliability across an operational monitoring estate.
GrafanaPrometheusAlertmanager
LinuxGlobal Logistics Provider
Assessment of a sprawling Grafana dashboard estate to identify duplication, broken panels, and the small set of dashboards anyone actually uses.
GrafanaPrometheus
Amazon S3
TerraformDigital Commerce Platform
Emergency remediation of Prometheus servers being OOM-killed repeatedly after a deployment introduced an unbounded label.
PrometheusKubernetesGrafanaAlertmanagerSupport options
AceMQ offers Grafana support in four tiers, each handing more of the day-to-day work to AceMQ: 24/7 support and incident management for the Grafana your team runs, proactive monitoring that catches slow queries, alert drift and version-window problems first, managed Grafana on your own infrastructure, and fully managed Grafana on AceMQ infrastructure. OSS and Enterprise are covered in all four.
You run it, we back you up
Best for: Teams that run Grafana OSS or Enterprise themselves and need senior cover when it goes dark.
You run it, we watch it with you
Best for: Teams that want the broken alert route found in a review, not during an outage.
We run it in your cloud or data centre
Best for: Regulated estates that must keep dashboards and data source credentials inside their own boundary.
We host it and run it, as a service
Best for: Teams that want a stable Grafana without running it, and without moving telemetry into a vendor's cloud.
| Who does what | Tier 1 24/7 support | Tier 2 Proactive monitoring | Tier 3 Managed, your infrastructure | Tier 4 Fully managed by AceMQ |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Who runs Grafana day to day? | Your team | Your team, with AceMQ reviews | AceMQ | AceMQ |
| Where does it run? | Your infrastructure | Your infrastructure | Your cloud account or data centre | AceMQ infrastructure |
| 24/7 incident response | 15-minute P1 response | 15-minute P1 response | 15-minute P1 response | 15-minute P1 response |
| Health checks and CVE alerts | On request | Scheduled | Included | Included |
| Patching and upgrades | Your team, AceMQ advises | Planned with AceMQ | Done by AceMQ | Done by AceMQ |
| Monitoring and on-call | Your team | Your team | AceMQ | AceMQ |
| Data, keys and accounts | Yours | Yours | Yours | Your data, hosted by AceMQ |
Every Tier can start as an ad hoc engagement or an annual partnership, and you can move up or down a Tier as your team changes.
One partner for Grafana
Support is one part of what AceMQ does for Grafana. The same engineers deliver consulting, health checks, migrations and end-of-life cover, and support the systems that usually run next to it.
AceMQ operates Grafana OSS or Grafana Enterprise and its backing database: instances behind a load balancer, backups, plugins, SSO, alerting in high availability, upgrades inside the support window and the pager. We run it in your account or on AceMQ's infrastructure. Dashboard content stays with your teams, and data sources such as Prometheus are covered by their own managed pages.
Those services are run by Grafana Labs, AWS or Microsoft inside their own platforms, and the provider decides versions. AceMQ operates standard Grafana in your account or ours, with system access and your choice of version. Dashboard design, alert quality and query cost need attention on all of them, and AceMQ supports the dashboards and alert rules on the hosted services at Tiers 1 and 2.
No. AceMQ is not a Grafana Labs partner or reseller. Grafana OSS is released under the AGPLv3, and Grafana Enterprise is a commercial Grafana Labs product that you license from them. For what either licence means for your use, ask your own counsel.
Yes. Dashboards, folders, data sources, alert rules, notification policies and contact points are provisioned from your repository, using files, Terraform or the Grafana Operator. We agree per folder whether the UI may edit it, and check for drift on a schedule so the repository keeps matching production.
Yes. AceMQ works on Grafana in two ways: ad hoc engagements for a defined piece of work, such as a health check, an upgrade or an incident, or an annual contract that covers 24/7 support and proactive reviews. Many teams start ad hoc and move to an annual contract once the first engagement is done.
Managed Grafana is quoted per scope, with no list price: the price depends on the number of environments and nodes, the SLA, whether AceMQ runs Grafana on your infrastructure (Tier 3) or on ours (Tier 4), and the access and change process you need. Request a quote and AceMQ replies within 1 hour.
Let's talk
Reactive cover, proactive reviews, or AceMQ running Grafana for you on your infrastructure or ours. A senior engineer scopes it with you, and quote requests are answered within 1 hour.
Production incident right now?Email a Grafana Architect
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