For hands-on practice
If you’d like to follow along with the path exercises and connect real data sources, you’ll need:
- A Grafana Cloud account (sign up free) 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 journey without hands-on practice. The concepts and decision frameworks are valuable on their own.
About permissions: Adding data sources requires the Organization Admin role. Setting permissions on an individual data source, for example restricting a source to one team, is a Grafana Cloud and Grafana Enterprise capability. If the Permissions tab is missing, it’s usually your role or edition, not a bug.