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Send data overview

Already have collectors?

Send your data to Grafana Cloud for storage, visualization, and monitoring.

Send data flow showing existing collectors sending data through various protocols to Grafana Cloud’s Mimir and Loki storage

Supported methods

MethodProtocolBest for
Prometheus remote_writePush metrics to MimirTeams already using Prometheus
InfluxDBInfluxDB line protocolTeams using InfluxDB collectors
GraphiteGraphite protocolTeams using Graphite/StatsD
OpenTelemetryOTLP (metrics, logs, traces)Teams using OTel instrumentation

Questions answered

With Send Data, you can answer…
What’s the p99 latency of my custom API endpoints?
How many orders/transactions/events are processed per minute?
What errors are occurring in my batch jobs or background workers?
How do my custom application metrics trend over time?

Problems solved

ProblemHow Send Data helps
Already have Prometheus runningUse remote_write to send to Grafana Cloud.
Need long-term storage for metrics13-month retention in Grafana Cloud
Using InfluxDB or GraphiteNative protocol support
Want centralized observability with existing toolsKeep your collectors, gain powerful visualization and alerting.

Keep your existing setup. If you’ve already invested in collection infrastructure, you don’t have to change it. Send your data to Grafana Cloud for powerful querying, visualization, and alerting capabilities.

Don’t have collectors yet? If you don’t have existing collectors, consider Grafana Alloy, Grafana’s distribution of the OpenTelemetry Collector with native support for Prometheus, Loki, and OTel pipelines.

Script

The second approach is sending data directly to Grafana Cloud from your own collection infrastructure. This is for teams who already have collectors running, whether that’s Prometheus, InfluxDB, Graphite, or OpenTelemetry.

Maybe you’ve invested in a collection pipeline you want to keep. Maybe you have organizational requirements. Whatever the reason, you can point your existing collectors at Grafana Cloud and use it as your storage backend.

Grafana Cloud accepts data via Prometheus remote_write, InfluxDB line protocol, Graphite, and OpenTelemetry’s OTLP. You keep your collectors, Grafana Cloud provides the storage, querying, visualization, and alerting platform.

The key difference from pre-packaged integrations? You’re in control. You decide which metrics to collect and you build your own dashboards. That’s more work, but it gives you flexibility. Grafana Cloud stores metrics for 13 months. That’s a lot longer than most self-hosted setups. Logs, traces, and profiles get 30 days by default, with options to purchase longer retention for logs.

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