Cost Management

What it does

When your agent uses it

• Investigating a high Grafana Cloud bill
• Attributing observability cost to a team
• Reducing active series / log bytes / trace spans
• Setting up usage / quota alerts — even when the user says our Grafana bill is too high

Example prompts

• “our Grafana bill is too high”
• “s burning the most metrics”
• “drop debug logs”
• “/cost-management”

Workflow steps

4 steps, taken from the step headings in SKILL.md.

1. 1Attribute cost to a team / service
2. 2Cut metric cardinality with Adaptive Metrics
3. 3Drop noisy logs in Alloy
4. 4Set a usage alert before you hit quota

What it can do on your machine

Read from SKILL.md and the folder at commit 1ccacf2. It shows what the files ask for, not the result of running them.

• Tool permissions

  Pre-approves nothing: there is no allowed-tools line, so your agent's usual permission prompts apply.

  From allowed-tools in the SKILL.md frontmatter.

• Runs code

  Shell commands in SKILL.md call:

  • curl
  • jq

  From the folder's file list and the shell code blocks in SKILL.md.

• Network

  Links to these hosts (documentation or services it may open):

  • grafana.com

  From URLs in SKILL.md, links to its own repository left out.

• Credentials

  Names no API keys, tokens, secrets or passwords.

  From names ending in _API_KEY, _TOKEN, _SECRET, _KEY or _PASSWORD in SKILL.md.

Context cost

Cost Management loads about 1.1k tokens when it runs, and up to ~2k if it reads all its reference files. Until then it costs about 179 tokens; SKILL.md has 171 words of instructions outside code blocks.

Always · name and description, kept in context so the agent knows when to use it

~179

When it runs · the whole SKILL.md, loaded when a task matches

~1.1k

With references · SKILL.md plus every file in references/, read only if the agent opens them

~2k

Estimates: characters ÷ 4, the usual rule of thumb; real counts depend on the model's tokenizer. Scripts and assets cost tokens only if the agent reads them.

Safety

Automated static check — not a guarantee. Review scripts before installing. It scans the text of SKILL.md for risky patterns (piping downloads into a shell, reading credential files, hidden Unicode, destructive commands); files beside SKILL.md are not scanned.

SKILL.md

The full file from grafana/skills at commit 1ccacf2, republished under its Apache-2.0 licence (© grafana). 171 words, ~1,139 tokens.

name

cost-management

description

Cut your Grafana Cloud bill by attributing spend to teams and reducing telemetry volume. Covers FOCUS-compliant billing dashboards, cost-attribution labels in Alloy, Adaptive Metrics (cardinality reduction), Adaptive Logs (drop/sample), Adaptive Traces (tail sampling), usage alerts, and an optimization checklist. Use when investigating a high Grafana Cloud bill, attributing observability cost to a team or service, reducing active series / log bytes / trace spans, or setting up usage / quota alerts — even when the user says "our Grafana bill is too high", "who's burning the most metrics", "drop debug logs", "sample our traces", or "alert me before we hit quota" without naming Cost Management.

license

Apache-2.0

# 1. Add external labels in Alloy (metrics + logs configs)
prometheus.remote_write "cloud" {
  endpoint { url = sys.env("PROMETHEUS_URL") /* ... */ }
  external_labels = { team = "platform", project = "checkout-service" }
}

# 2. Reload Alloy
curl -X POST http://localhost:12345/-/reload

# 3. Verify labels arrived in Grafana Cloud
#    In Explore, run:  count by (team, project) ({__name__=~".+"})
#    Then visit Cost Management → group by `team` / `project`

# 1. Pull recommendations
curl https://<stack>.grafana.net/api/plugins/grafana-adaptive-metrics-app/resources/v1/recommendations \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer <token>" | jq '.recommendations | length'

# 2. In the UI: Grafana Cloud → Adaptive Metrics → review rules sorted by series-reduction impact
# 3. Test in "Preview" mode before applying
# 4. Apply (takes effect within 5 min)

# 5. Verify — series count should drop on the affected metrics
#    Before applying, capture baseline:
#      count({__name__="http_request_duration_seconds_bucket"})
#    Wait 10 min after apply, run again — expect 10x+ reduction for high-card metrics.

# Rollback if needed: open the rule in the UI → Disable, or DELETE /v1/rules/<id>.

# 1. Add a filter stage (see references/adaptive-signals.md for the full block)
loki.process "filter_logs" {
  forward_to = [loki.write.cloud.receiver]
  stage.drop { expression = ".*GET /health.*" }
}

# 2. Reload Alloy
curl -X POST http://localhost:12345/-/reload

# 3. Verify the filter — health logs should NOT appear in Logs Drilldown
#    LogQL check (should return 0):
#      sum(rate({app="my-app"} |= "GET /health" [5m]))
#    Bytes-ingested should also drop. Compare 24h before/after:
#      sum(increase(loki_ingester_chunk_size_bytes_sum[24h])) by (namespace)

© grafana, Apache-2.0. Rendered from Markdown: HTML in the file is shown as text, images as links, and headings moved down two levels. Raw file

Files

SKILL.md and 2 other files (references) in skills/grafana-cloud/cost-management of grafana/skills.

• SKILL.md
• references/adaptive-signals.md
• references/alerts-and-queries.md

Open the folder on GitHubat commit 1ccacf2