Menu
Grafana Cloud

Instrument and send data to Grafana Cloud

Caution

Grafana Alloy is the new name for our distribution of the OTel collector. Grafana Agent has been deprecated and is in Long-Term Support (LTS) through October 31, 2025. Grafana Agent will reach an End-of-Life (EOL) on November 1, 2025. Read more about why we recommend migrating to Grafana Alloy.

After you’ve created a Grafana Cloud account, the next step is to connect data to your Grafana stack. You can connect to your data using one of three primary methods, depending on what service or database is producing the data and how you want to use Grafana Cloud to work with that data.

Instrument applications

Follow the application instrumentation guide to find out how to instrument your application with OpenTelemetry or Prometheus.

Not sure where to go?
Answer a few questions and Grot will show you a helpful next step.

Explore

Monitor your infrastructure
Grafana Cloud offers many integrations to monitor the health and performance of services such as operating systems, databases, Cloud apps, and more. Learn how use these integrations to monitor your infrastructure.
Grafana Agent
Grafana Agent is a vendor neutral collector that is fully compatible with the Prometheus, OpenTelemetry, and Grafana open source ecosystems. Learn how to use Grafana Agent to collect and send data to these ecosystems and more.
Grafana Alloy
Grafana Alloy is a vendor-neutral distribution of the OpenTelemetry Collector. Alloy offers native pipelines for OTel, Prometheus, Pyroscope, Loki, and many other metrics, logs, traces, and profile tools. Learn how to use Alloy to quickly find and process your data in complex environments.
AWS Private Link
AWS PrivateLink provides private connectivity between virtual private clouds, supported AWS services, and your on-premises networks without exposing your traffic to the public internet. Learn how to send telemetry from your AWS Virtual Private Cloud to Grafana Cloud while staying on the Amazon network.
Azure Private Link
Azure PrivateLink provides private connectivity between your Azure Virtual Network and Grafana Cloud without xposing your traffic to the public internet. Learn how to send telemetry from your Azure Virtual Network to Grafana Cloud while staying on the Amazon network.
Traces
Grafana Cloud supports Tempo, and most other open source traces formats, including Jaeger, Zipkin, and OpenTelemetry. Learn how to use the trace storage and query engine to understand the flow of requests and data in your software systems and track down issues quickly.
OpenTelemetry Protocol
Learn how to use OpenTelemetry tools, APIs, and SDKs to instrument, generate, collect, and export telemetry data and analyze your software’s performance and behavior.
Metrics
Learn how to send Prometheus, Graphite, InfluxDB, and Datadog metrics to Grafana Cloud Metrics.
Logs
Grafana supports Loki and all other log formats. You can use Grafana Agent to send your logs. It can easily scale to multiple Loki instances and it’s easy to enable other, Agent-driven features. You can use Promtail if your primary need is to use a UI.

Next steps

If you’re using integrations, you should have automatic access to dashboards and alert rules. If you’ve used an other method to connect your data to Grafana Cloud, refer to the following topics to learn how to visualize and alert on that data: