Connect and send data to Grafana Cloud

To create your Grafana Cloud account:

Navigate to https://grafana.com/products/cloud/.
Click Start for free on the banner.
Follow the instructions to finish setting up your account and access the Cloud Account Portal.

After you’ve created your account, the next step is to connect data to your Grafana stack. To choose how you want to connect, determine whether your data should remain in a local environment or be sent to Grafana Cloud.

Data managed in Grafana Cloud

When you connect your observability data to the Grafana backend and send your 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 applications

Grafana Cloud accounts offer multiple solutions that provide preconfigured alert rules and dashboards that require minimal configuration. For more information about instrumenting and working with your data using these solutions, refer to:

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.

Customized connections with Grafana Cloud

If you’re already collecting observability data with Prometheus, Loki, Tempo, or Pyroscope, you can use your cloud account to store, manage, and act on it. 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:

Locally managed data with 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. Grafana data source connections give you 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.

With any Grafana Cloud account, admins have automatic access to many natively supported data sources as well as many data source plugins created by the open source community.

With an Enterprise license, you have access to even more Grafana-supported data source plugins for many popular data stores, Cloud services, and applications.

For more information, refer to Connect to data sources.