Put your data to work on Grafana Labs

After you connect

Mon, 29 Jun 2026 16:02:35 -0500

After you connect

You’ve explored common data sources and connected one with a guided learning path. Connecting is only the start. After Grafana can reach your data, you can query it, visualize it, and alert on it, all where it already lives. In this section, you’ll:

Build a dashboard: Turn queries into panels you can reuse
Alert on your data: Get notified when something needs attention

Before you continue

Already connected a data source? You’re ready. If not, you can still follow along and try it on your own stack afterward.

Estimated time

5 minutes

Build a dashboard

Mon, 29 Jun 2026 16:02:35 -0500

Build a dashboard

After a query returns the data you want, turn it into a panel. A dashboard is a set of panels, and each panel runs a query against a data source and visualizes the result.

Tip: Before you build a panel, confirm the data source is returning data. Open it in Explore to run a quick query, no dashboard required.

Now try building one yourself. This hands-on learning path walks you through turning a query into a time series panel in a dashboard. Some data sources, like CloudWatch, also include prebuilt dashboards you can import, so you won’t always have to start from scratch.

Learning path

Visualize metrics

Welcome to the Grafana learning path that shows you how to visualize CPU metrics in a dashboard.

13 min

Beginner

Docs & blog posts

Open in Grafana Cloud

Complete this learning path directly in your Grafana Cloud stack, or in the Grafana Play stack, with an interactive learning experience.

Open in Grafana Cloud Try in Grafana Play

View on website

Alert on your data

Mon, 29 Jun 2026 16:02:35 -0500

Alert on your data

You can alert on a connected data source using Grafana-managed alerting. A Grafana-managed alert rule runs a query against your data source on a schedule and fires when a condition is met, for example when error rate stays above a threshold.

Two things to know

Consideration	Detail
Not every source supports alerting	A data source must support alerting to be used in a rule. Common sources like Prometheus, Loki, Elasticsearch, CloudWatch, InfluxDB, MySQL, and PostgreSQL do.
Rules and notifications are separate	A rule defines when something is wrong. To control who gets notified, set up contact points and notification policies in Alerts & IRM.

Key insight: Alerting works on data in place. You don’t have to move your data to Grafana Cloud to alert on it.

Create your first alert rule

Ready to set one up? This hands-on learning path builds the alert query in one of these:

Prometheus or Mimir (for metrics)
Loki (for logs)

The concepts apply to any alerting-capable data source, but if you connected a different one, you must write the query in that source’s own query language.

Learning path

Create infrastructure alerts

Learn how to create alert rules for your infrastructure metrics and logs in Grafana Cloud.

20 min

Beginner

Docs & blog posts

Open in Grafana Cloud

Complete this learning path directly in your Grafana Cloud stack, or in the Grafana Play stack, with an interactive learning experience.

Open in Grafana Cloud Try in Grafana Play

View on website

Rename data sources safely

Mon, 29 Jun 2026 16:02:35 -0500

Dashboards reference a data source by ID, not name

A common pitfall after connecting involves how Grafana tracks your data sources. Every data source has a unique identifier (UID). Your dashboards, panels, and alert rules point to that UID behind the scenes, not to the display name you see.

This matters most when you change a data source:

Rename in place when you want a new name. An edited name keeps the same UID, so everything that uses the data source keeps working.
Avoid delete-and-recreate. A recreated data source gets a new UID, so existing panels and alert rules can no longer find it and fail to load.
Imported dashboards from another organization may reference a UID that doesn’t exist in your stack. Repoint each panel to a data source you have.

Resources and next steps

Mon, 29 Jun 2026 16:02:35 -0500

You’re set up to work with data sources

You can choose a data source, connect it with a guided learning path, and put it to work by querying, visualizing, and alerting on your data where it already lives. Here’s where to go next.

Documentation

Learn more about connecting and using data sources:

Blog posts

See data sources in action:

Community

Connect with other Grafana users:

Continue learning

Here are additional resources to continue learning: