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Grafana Cloud

OpenTelemetry integration

OpenTelemetry instrumentation is the recommended standard to observe applications with Grafana Cloud.

This integration helps you set up the Grafana Agent to send all OpenTelemetry data: traces, metrics, and logs, to Grafana Cloud.

Note that it is also possible to send OpenTelemetry signals to Grafana Cloud using the OpenTelemetry Collector as documented here.

Moreover, Grafana Cloud will soon expose a native OTLP intake supporting all signal types: traces, metrics, and logs, that will simplify the data collection architecture.

  • You can read more about OpenTelemetry at Grafana here.
  • If you want to use OpenTelemetry with Grafana OSS, please follow any of these guides.

Install OpenTelemetry integration for Grafana Cloud

The following OpenTelemetry integrations are available:

  • “OpenTelemetry (OTLP)” describes how to send data from any application 1 to Grafana Cloud.
  • “Java OpenTelemetry” explains all steps to run the Java Agent instrumentation.

To install any of the integrations, follow these steps:

  1. In your Grafana Cloud stack, click Connections in the left-hand menu.
  2. Search for the integration name and click its tile to open the integration.
  3. Follow the steps to set up the Grafana Agent as well as your application.

Exploring Telemetry Data

Once you have started your application, it’s time to take a look at the telemetry data.

The Data Visualization section contains guides to explore logs, metrics, and traces.

Dashboards

In addition to exploring data, you can also import one of the recommended OpenTelemetry Grafana dashboards.

Cost

By connecting your Application to Grafana Cloud, you might incur charges. To view information on the number of active series that your Grafana Cloud account uses for metrics included in each Cloud tier, see Active series and dpm usage and Cloud tier pricing.


  1. any application from a programming language that supports the OpenTelemetry environment variables, at least for OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_* ↩︎