Connect or send data to Grafana Cloud

After you create your Grafana Cloud account, determine whether your data should remain in an external environment or be sent to and managed in Grafana Cloud.

Data managed in Grafana Cloud

When you send your observability data to Grafana Cloud, you can avoid complicated customizations and take advantage of features such as:

Centralized, long-term data storage
Aggregated datasets
Secure global access

Grafana Cloud solutions

For sending to and managing in Grafana Cloud, Grafana Cloud offers these solutions:

The following solutions offer setup using the Instrumentation Hub for activation and instrumentation. Included is knowledge graph technology and preconfigured alert rules and dashboards.

Grafana Cloud integrations

Integrations offer tailored Grafana dashboards and alerting defaults for common observability targets like Linux hosts and Nginx servers. With Grafana integrations, you can get a preconfigured Prometheus and Grafana-based observability stack up and running in minutes. To learn more, refer to Get started with monitoring using an integration.

Alternative methods to send data to Grafana Cloud

You can use your cloud account to store, manage, and act on telemetry data. While an integration is the easiest method to do this, you can also use other instrumentation methods, such as deploying Grafana Alloy manually or using Promtail for logs. For more information on connecting data with alternative methods, refer to:

Externally managed data connected to Grafana Cloud

Grafana is founded on the premise that you should be able to query, visualize, and alert on your data no matter where it’s stored. As part of your Cloud account, you have automatic access to natively supported data sources, which provide a way to centralize data that is often siloed across platforms and vendors. When you can view and act on your data in one place, you can build queries across multiple data sources and display the results in dashboards—without leaving your Grafana Cloud stack. You can also access many data source plugins created by the open source community.

For more information, refer to Connect to data sources.