Grafana Cloud

Overview

Grafana Cloud is a fully managed observability platform built on open-source foundations — Grafana for visualization, Prometheus for metrics, Loki for logs, and Tempo for distributed tracing. Engineering and SRE teams use it to monitor infrastructure health, application performance, and service reliability. Grafana dashboards can be embedded in internal portals for operational visibility. The platform also includes Grafana Faro, an optional frontend observability SDK for real user monitoring (RUM) on web applications. The consent management implications of Grafana depend entirely on whether Faro is deployed on a customer-facing site.

What This Script Does

Backend monitoring only (most deployments):

For organizations using Grafana Cloud solely for infrastructure monitoring and internal dashboards, there is no browser-side script presence on customer-facing websites. Grafana Agent (or the newer Alloy collector) runs as a server-side daemon on infrastructure nodes — it scrapes Prometheus metrics, tails log files, and collects traces from application services. All telemetry data flows from servers directly to Grafana Cloud's ingestion endpoints (prometheus-prod-[region].grafana.net, logs-prod-[region].grafana.net). No end-user browser is involved.

Grafana Faro (frontend RUM — optional, requires explicit deployment):

Grafana Faro is a JavaScript SDK that can be deployed on web applications to collect real user monitoring data from end-user browsers. If Faro is deployed (cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/@grafana/faro-web-sdk or self-hosted), it collects:

• Page performance metrics: Web Vitals (LCP, FID/INP, CLS, TTFB), navigation timing, resource loading durations
• JavaScript errors: Uncaught exceptions and unhandled promise rejections with stack traces and browser context
• Session traces: User navigation events as distributed traces, linking frontend actions to backend service calls
• Session identifiers: Faro generates a session ID (stored in sessionStorage, not a persistent cookie) for the duration of the browser session to correlate events within a single visit

Faro transmits collected data to Grafana Cloud's collector endpoint (faro.grafana.net/collect or a self-hosted Grafana Alloy endpoint).

Consent & Compliance

• Backend only: No browser-side presence, no consent obligations for website visitors.
• Grafana Faro (if deployed):
  • Category: Analytics
  • GDPR/ePrivacy: Faro collects session-level telemetry that may constitute personal data processing, particularly if session traces can be linked to identified users. The operational purpose (monitoring application health) supports a legitimate interest argument, but session-level tracking with identifiable patterns may require consent depending on implementation specifics and jurisdiction. If Faro is deployed without user identification, the case for legitimate interest is stronger.
  • CCPA: Session and performance data may constitute personal information. Disclose Faro's use if deployed.
  • Self-hosting advantage: Organizations that route Faro data through a self-hosted Grafana Alloy collector rather than directly to Grafana Cloud retain data within their own infrastructure, reducing third-party data sharing implications.

Should You Block This Without Consent?

Conditional. If using only backend infrastructure monitoring and internal dashboards, there is nothing to block. If Grafana Faro (frontend RUM) is deployed on a customer-facing site, evaluate whether the session telemetry collection requires consent based on your implementation depth and applicable jurisdiction.