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Section 1 · Data source fundamentals

Understanding data sources in Grafana.

Estimated time: 2 min

A connection to where your data lives

A data source is a connection to a backend that holds your data, such as a Prometheus server, a Loki instance, a SQL database, or a cloud monitoring service. Every data source:

  • Comes from a data source plugin, the connector software. Common ones are built in; for others you install the plugin first.
  • Is the configured instance you add from that plugin, with its own connection details. You install a plugin, but you configure a data source.
  • Comes with a query editor that formulates queries in the source’s own language
  • Lets you query, visualize, and alert on your data without moving it

Your data already lives across systems like these. Grafana connects to them as data sources without custom integration code or a separate data pipeline, querying each one through its API instead of collecting your data with an agent. Your data stays where it lives, with no migration.

Grafana sends a query to your data source and the data comes back. Your data stays in its original system.

What connecting gives you

With that connection, you can:

CapabilityWhat it means
QueryRun queries against your data from Grafana, using each source’s query language.
VisualizeBuild dashboards and panels from those queries.
AlertCreate alert rules that watch your data and notify you. A single alert rule can query more than one data source, for example a Prometheus error rate alongside an Elasticsearch log query.

You can also combine multiple data sources in a single dashboard, for example Prometheus metrics alongside MySQL application data and CloudWatch stats.