---
title: "Prerequisites | Grafana Labs"
description: "What you need before starting this course"
---

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

## For hands-on practice

If you’d like to follow along with the learning path exercises and configure cloud provider integrations, you’ll need:

- A Grafana Cloud account ([sign up free](/signup/cloud/connect-account))
- Access to AWS, Azure, or GCP with running resources
- Grafana Cloud permissions to configure integrations (see below)
- Cloud provider permissions to create IAM roles/service accounts

**Just exploring?** You can complete the course without hands-on practice. The concepts and decision frameworks are valuable on their own.

## Grafana Cloud permissions

| Role                     | What you can do                                 |
|--------------------------|-------------------------------------------------|
| **Admin**                | Full read/write access to all providers         |
| **AWS/Azure/GCP Writer** | Read access + write access to specific provider |
| **Editor**               | Read-only access (can view, not configure)      |

Cloud Provider Observability offers [fine-grained RBAC roles](/docs/grafana-cloud/monitor-infrastructure/monitor-cloud-provider/rbac/) so your organization can grant specific access without full admin permissions.

**Note:** If you plan to configure scrape or stream jobs using Terraform, you’ll need permissions to create access policy tokens. This typically requires the Admin role, unless an Admin provides you with a pre-generated token.

## Recommended prior knowledge

| Topic                              | Why it helps                               |
|------------------------------------|--------------------------------------------|
| Basic Grafana navigation           | You’ll explore dashboards and data sources |
| Your cloud provider’s console      | You’ll configure IAM and integrations      |
| Understanding your cloud resources | You’ll know what to monitor                |