Mimir and Loki costs track label and series choices — design must reflect top services first.
Grafana
Design LGTM architecture your SRE and platform teams can scale
LGTM stacks fail quietly through cardinality creep, overlapping tenants, and retention defaults nobody owns. Without a design, cloud bills and incident triage both get harder at the same time.
Tenancy model Cardinality guardrails Cloud or self-managed Bounded design
Why this matters
Why this matters
Architecture decisions on labels, retention, and access patterns are expensive to unwind after dashboards and alerts depend on them.
Tempo and trace sampling belong in the architecture, not as a late add-on.
Coexistence with Splunk, Datadog, or Elastic is common — boundaries should be explicit, not political.
What you get
Clear outputs you can use
Scoped LGTM and Grafana Cloud architecture design: tenancy, environments, cardinality and retention guardrails, access model, and coexistence with existing observability tools.
- ✓ Target-state LGTM architecture and tenancy documentation
- ✓ Cardinality, retention, and access standards for metrics, logs, and traces
- ✓ Implementation backlog for Loki, Mimir, dashboards, and integration work
Why teams talk to GKC
Calm, practical, and grounded in the environment you already have
Open-stack pragmatism — cloud vs self-managed trade-offs without ideology
Designed for OTel-native ingest paths when you are headed that way
Does not mandate rip-and-replace of existing observability investments
What happens next
A straightforward first step
We keep the first step straightforward so you can understand fit, scope, and likely value before deciding what to do next.
1
Confirm scope and consumers
We agree teams, environments, compliance needs, and which signals (metrics, logs, traces) are in phase one.
2
Design LGTM target state
Architecture covers tenancy, ingest paths, cardinality controls, retention tiers, and Grafana access patterns.
3
Review and hand off
You receive documentation for platform and SRE leads with routed next steps on this hub or general services.
Questions teams often have
Common questions
We only need dashboards. Is full LGTM design overkill?
If scope is dashboards-only, implementation may be enough. This service fits when Loki/Mimir/Tempo paths and tenancy need definition before scale.
Grafana Labs already gave us a reference design.
We tailor tenancy, cardinality, and retention to your teams and billing reality — not a generic multi-tenant template.
Will this force Grafana Cloud?
No. We document cloud and self-managed options with honest trade-offs for your skills and cost model.
Related services
If this is close, these may be relevant too
Grafana
Grafana Stack Assessment
A focused assessment of your Grafana/LGTM posture: signal coverage, architecture options, cost drivers, and a prioritised plan for the next 90 days.
Grafana
Loki Log Pipeline Optimisation
A scoped optimisation of your Loki ingest path: label strategy, retention, agents/collectors, and query patterns — with measurable before/after targets.
Value and Cost Clarity
Observability Health Check
The Observability Health Check is a focused review of how your current setup is performing, where value is being lost, and what to improve first.
Next step
Start with a practical conversation
We can talk through the environment, what is making this feel urgent or uncertain, and whether this service is the right fit. If another starting point makes more sense, we will say so.