---
title: "Connect or send data to Grafana Cloud | Grafana Cloud documentation"
description: "Choices for connecting and sending data to Grafana Cloud and for working with local data"
---

# Connect or send data to Grafana Cloud

After you [create your Grafana Cloud account](/docs/grafana-cloud/get-started/create-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 data to and managing it in Grafana Cloud, these solutions are available:

- [Cloud Provider Observability](/docs/grafana-cloud/monitor-infrastructure/monitor-cloud-provider/): monitor your AWS, Azure, or GCP cloud services in one place
- [Database Observability](/docs/grafana-cloud/monitor-applications/database-observability/get-started/): identify slow queries and monitor the health of your databases
- [Frontend Observability](/docs/grafana-cloud/monitor-applications/frontend-observability/): understand how real users experience your web application
- [Performance testing and synthetic monitoring](/docs/grafana-cloud/testing/): run load tests and uptime checks to validate performance before and after deployments
- [AI Observability](/docs/grafana-cloud/monitor-applications/ai-observability/): monitor the performance, cost, and behavior of your AI models and LLM applications

The following solutions send data to Grafana Cloud. They also offer setup using the [Instrumentation Hub](/docs/grafana-cloud/get-started/inst-hub-setup/) for activation and instrumentation. Included is [knowledge graph technology](/docs/grafana-cloud/knowledge-graph/introduction/) and preconfigured alert rules and dashboards.

- [Kubernetes Monitoring](/docs/grafana-cloud/monitor-infrastructure/kubernetes-monitoring/): get full visibility into your K8s cluster health, workloads, and infrastructure
- [Application Observability](/docs/grafana-cloud/monitor-applications/application-observability/): trace requests and understand the performance of your services and dependencies

### Grafana Cloud integrations

Integrations also send data to Grafana Cloud. Integrations provide 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](/docs/grafana-cloud/monitor-infrastructure/integrations/get-started/).

### Other methods to send data to Grafana Cloud

You can use your Grafana Cloud account to store, manage, and act on telemetry data. While an integration or observability solution is the easiest method to do this, you can also use other instrumentation methods. These include deploying Grafana Alloy manually. For more information on sending data with other methods, refer to:

- [OTLP](/docs/grafana-cloud/send-data/otlp/): send telemetry data to Grafana Cloud using the OpenTelemetry standard protocol
- [Metrics](/docs/grafana-cloud/send-data/metrics/): send numeric time-series data such as CPU usage, request rates, or error counts
- [Logs](/docs/grafana-cloud/send-data/logs/): send log output from your applications and infrastructure for search and analysis
- [Traces](/docs/grafana-cloud/send-data/traces/set-up/): send distributed trace data to follow requests across your services
- [Profiles](/docs/grafana-cloud/monitor-applications/profiles/send-profile-data/): send continuous profiling data to identify performance bottlenecks in your code

## 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.

You can connect external data sources to Grafana Cloud. Then you can visualize data from multiple platforms side by side and correlate signals across systems, without moving or duplicating your data.

### Natively supported data sources

As part of your Cloud account, you have automatic access to natively supported data sources. This provides a way to query and visualize data that is often siloed across platforms and vendors, without moving the data. 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, and never leave your Grafana Cloud stack. For more information, refer to [Connect to data sources](/docs/grafana-cloud/connect-externally-hosted/).

### Community data source plugins

You can also access many data source plugins created by the open source community.

### Work with a demo data source

You can get hands-on experience [working with demo data](/docs/grafana-cloud/get-started/connect-send/explore-demo-data/) to understand how connecting to a data source works.