Slide 4 of 4

Prerequisites

For any hands-on practice

To follow along with the learning path exercises, you need:

  • A Grafana Cloud account (sign up free)
  • Access to at least one cloud provider (AWS, Azure, or GCP), with running resources to monitor such as EC2 instances, Azure VMs, or GCE machines

The permissions you need depend on which path you take.

Requirements for Cloud Provider Observability

  • An Admin or per-provider Writer role in Grafana Cloud to configure Cloud Provider Observability
  • Cloud provider permissions to create IAM roles or service accounts for data collection
  • Without a Grafana Cloud basic role, the Datasources:Reader fixed role to see dashboard data
  • With no basic role or only the Viewer basic role, the Dashboards:Writer and Folders:Writer fixed roles to install dashboards and alerts

Requirements for using a data source

  • Permission to add a data source in Grafana
  • Read-only credentials for your cloud provider (no Cloud Provider Observability write access or access policy tokens needed)
TopicWhy it helps
Basic Grafana navigationYou’ll explore dashboards and data sources
Your cloud provider’s consoleYou’ll configure IAM and collection jobs

Just exploring? You can complete the journey without hands-on practice. The concepts are valuable on their own.

Script

Before the hands-on exercises, here’s what you’ll need. Everyone needs a Grafana Cloud account and access to a cloud provider with running resources to monitor. To store your data with Cloud Provider Observability, you also need an Admin or per-provider Writer role in Grafana Cloud, plus permission to create IAM roles or service accounts in your cloud. Depending on your Grafana Cloud role, you might also need the Datasources Reader fixed role to see dashboard data, and the Dashboards Writer and Folders Writer fixed roles to install dashboards and alerts. To query your data in place with a data source, you need less: permission to add a data source, and read-only credentials. And if you’re just exploring the concepts, none of this is required.
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