---
title: "I have an app and want to send its telemetry | Grafana Labs"
description: "Instrument your app with OpenTelemetry and send metrics, logs, and traces to one Grafana Cloud endpoint"
---

> For a curated documentation index, see [llms.txt](/llms.txt). For the complete documentation index, see [llms-full.txt](/llms-full.txt).

Section 2 · Choose a starting point

Instrument your app with OpenTelemetry and send metrics, logs, and traces to one Grafana Cloud endpoint

Estimated time: 3 min

## I have an app and want to send its telemetry

Suppose you have an app and want to see how it behaves in production. You want to know how fast requests run, where errors happen, and what a slow request touched along the way. That’s when you instrument it with **OpenTelemetry**, an open standard for producing telemetry from your own code.

Here’s what this option does:

- Adds an agent or SDK to your app that produces **metrics**, **logs**, and **traces**
- Sends all three to the **OTLP endpoint**, a single Grafana Cloud destination that accepts them all
- Stores the data in Grafana Cloud, where you can query it, visualize it, and alert on it

## Considerations

- **Setup depends on your language**: Grafana Cloud has guided setup for Java and .NET apps, and for apps already instrumented with OpenTelemetry. For other languages, you instrument with OpenTelemetry’s own SDKs.
- **Kubernetes apps can skip manual setup**: If your app runs on Kubernetes, **Instrumentation Hub**, a setup tool in Grafana Cloud in public preview, discovers your services and adds OpenTelemetry instrumentation for you, without code changes or image rebuilds. Refer to [Set up with Instrumentation Hub](/docs/grafana-cloud/learn-and-build/get-started/set-up-your-account/inst-hub-setup/).
- **Production setups add a collector**: For production, Grafana Labs recommends running **Grafana Alloy**, a collector, between your app and Grafana Cloud. For development and testing, your app can send straight to the endpoint. The tools aren’t split by job: Alloy can also collect app telemetry, and OpenTelemetry can also collect infrastructure data. This starting point just uses OpenTelemetry to instrument an app.
- **What you send counts toward usage**: Usage-based billing works differently for each signal type. For details, refer to [Grafana Cloud pricing](/pricing/).
- **Application Observability costs extra**: Once your data is flowing, you can optionally activate **Application Observability**, a ready-made view of your services and their health. It’s a paid feature, built on the **Knowledge Graph**, which discovers your services and surfaces insights about issues.

## Before you start

- A Grafana Cloud account: [sign up free](/signup/cloud/connect-account) if you don’t have one
- The **Admin** role in your Grafana Cloud stack. Your app authenticates with a **token**, and creating one takes an administrator.
- An app you can add instrumentation to and redeploy, or the demo data below if you don’t have one yet

## Try it yourself

The guide below runs in your own Grafana Cloud stack. You open the OpenTelemetry connection setup, create a token, copy the configuration into your app, and confirm data is arriving with a query in **Explore**. If you’re an administrator, an optional last section activates **Application Observability** so you can see your service in its catalog.

#### Send your app's telemetry to Grafana Cloud

Complete this interactive guide directly in your Grafana Cloud stack with an interactive learning experience.

[Open in Grafana Cloud]()

### Don’t have an instrumented app?

Install the demo data instead. It’s the telemetry of a fictional pizza service, stored in hosted data sources that are free to use, so you can see what an instrumented app looks like in Grafana Cloud before you instrument your own.

#### Explore demo data from an instrumented app

Complete this interactive guide directly in your Grafana Cloud stack with an interactive learning experience.

[Open in Grafana Cloud]()