---
title: "Why store and how it works | Grafana Labs"
description: "Benefits of storing data and how it flows to Grafana Cloud."
---

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

## Benefits

| Benefit                 | Description                           |
|-------------------------|---------------------------------------|
| **Unified storage**     | All cloud providers in one place      |
| **Long-term retention** | Keep data as long as you need         |
| **Powerful querying**   | PromQL for metrics, LogQL for logs    |
| **Unified alerting**    | One alerting system across all clouds |

## How data flows

[Data flow from cloud providers through collection to Grafana Cloud](cp-olly-data-flow-1.svg "Data flow from cloud providers through collection to Grafana Cloud")

| Method             | Description                  | Best for                                  |
|--------------------|------------------------------|-------------------------------------------|
| **Scrape Jobs**    | Grafana Cloud pulls via API. | Quick start, evaluation, Azure production |
| **Metric Streams** | Cloud pushes in real-time.   | AWS production (recommended)              |
| **Grafana Alloy**  | Universal collector agent    | Multi-cloud, complex processing           |