---
title: "Key takeaways | Grafana Labs"
description: "Summary of what you've learned."
---

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

## What you learned

1. **Data sources connect Grafana to external systems**: query, visualize, and create alerts on data where it already lives
2. **Common data sources by use case:**
   
   - Metrics: Prometheus, InfluxDB
   - Logs: Loki, Elasticsearch
   - Cloud: CloudWatch
   - Application data: MySQL, PostgreSQL
   - Flexible: Infinity, Google Sheets
3. **The critical trade-off:**
   
   - **Data Sources** = Query, visualize, alert (same alerting engine as integrations; some include pre-built dashboards)
   - **Integrations / Send Telemetry** = Full Grafana Cloud features (ML insights, SLOs, correlations)

## The one thing to remember

> **Data sources let you query, visualize, and alert.** Same alerting engine, same dashboarding capabilities. The trade-off: data stays external, so you won’t get ML-powered insights, SLOs, or cross-signal correlations.