Grafana Cloud Agent, now known as Grafana Agent, is a memory-efficient subset of Prometheus designed for hosted metrics, reducing memory usage by up to 40% compared to Prometheus. Unlike Prometheus, it omits querying and local storage, instead focusing on remote_write to platforms like Cortex. This makes it suitable for large-scale deployments by distributing memory load across clusters, particularly in Kubernetes environments, through optional host filtering. While it lacks Prometheus's recording and alerting capabilities, these functions are supported within Cortex and Grafana Cloud, ensuring alert reliability depends on the hosted solution. The Agent is compatible with any platform supporting the Prometheus remote_write API, not just Grafana Cloud. Future enhancements include support for Graphite and Loki, and a new scraping service mode to improve metrics capture from problematic nodes. The introduction of Grafana Cloud Agent addresses scalability challenges while maintaining a Prometheus-like experience, providing a streamlined alternative to existing collection agents.