---
title: "Key takeaways | Grafana Labs"
description: "Summary of what you've learned."
---

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

## What you learned

1. **Two approaches to cloud observability:**
   
   - **Store in Grafana Cloud**: Full platform features, unified alerting, long-term retention
   - **Query directly**: Faster setup, data stays in cloud provider
2. **Collection methods for storing data:**
   
   - Metrics: Scrape jobs (simple), Metric Streams (low latency), Alloy (flexible)
   - Logs: Lambda/Functions (serverless), Firehose (streaming), Alloy (universal)
3. **Cloud provider data sources:**
   
   - AWS CloudWatch (metrics + logs)
   - Azure Monitor (metrics + logs)
   - GCP Cloud Monitoring (metrics) + Cloud Logging (logs)

## The one thing to remember

> **Store data in Grafana Cloud** for unified alerting, PromQL/LogQL, and full platform features. **Query directly** for quick setup when you don’t need those capabilities.