---
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 connect real data sources, you’ll need:

- A Grafana Cloud account ([sign up free](/signup/cloud/connect-account)) or access to a Grafana instance
- Access to a data source you want to connect (database, metrics store, etc.)
- Organization Admin permissions in Grafana (required to add data sources)

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

## Recommended prior knowledge

| Topic                    | Why it helps                              |
|--------------------------|-------------------------------------------|
| Basic Grafana navigation | You’ll configure data sources in the UI   |
| Understanding your data  | You’ll know which data source type to use |
| Connection details       | You’ll need hostnames, credentials, etc.  |