Documentation Grafana Cloud Introduction

Introduction to Grafana Cloud

With Grafana Cloud, you can enable observability without the overhead of building and maintaining your own stack. Find information here that is foundational to being successful with Grafana Cloud or that is useful to beginners who are trying to understand the basics, such as observability concepts and terminology, visualizations, alerts, and dashboards.

Grafana Cloud’s ecosystem of data sources, integrations, and applications unify disparate data and natively correlate between metrics, logs, and traces so that you can speed up root cause analysis and quickly solve issues. Learn more about the basic observability concepts along with foundational tools to help you get started monitoring.

What is observability?

A basic overview of observability terms and concepts as well as an introduction to Prometheus.

Also refer to a glossary list of terms.

Metrics and visualization

A brief introduction to visualizing metrics.

Visualize existing observability data

Use Grafana Cloud to visualize your existing data sources that run in your environment.

Store, query, and alert on data

How to send data to Grafana Cloud from existing sources or start from scratch using Grafana Agent, exporters, and integrations.

Dashboard overview

A basic overview of how dashboards work.

Histograms and heatmaps

A brief introduction to visualization techniques such as histograms and heatmaps.

Find and use dashboards

How to import, export, create, and configure dashboards.

Find and use plugins

How to find and install a plugin to visualize a data source or application.