---
title: "Three approaches to data | Grafana Labs"
description: "Overview of the three ways Grafana works with your data and how to choose."
---

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

## Three approaches to data

[Three approaches: Integrations, data sources, and send telemetry](three-approaches.svg "Three approaches: Integrations, data sources, and send telemetry")

> **Important trade-off**: With **data sources**, your data stays external. You won’t have access to some Grafana Cloud features like **ML-powered insights**, **SLOs**, or **cross-signal correlations**. Some data sources include pre-built dashboards.