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Section 1 · Integration fundamentals

Understanding Grafana integrations

Estimated time: 1 min

What’s an integration?

An integration is prepackaged monitoring for a specific technology, such as a Linux host, MySQL database, or Kafka cluster. It deploys the Grafana Alloy collector to bring your data into Grafana Cloud, ready to use with prebuilt dashboards and alerts.

Why use an integration?

  • Fast setup: Connect a technology in minutes.
  • Maintained defaults: Grafana Labs maintains the default dashboards and alert rules.
  • Broad coverage: Choose from a large library of prebuilt integrations across hosts, databases, web and proxy, messaging, and network systems.

What’s included in an integration?

Every integration includes three things:

  • Grafana Alloy configuration: Preconfigured collection settings and a curated set of default metrics for your technology. Some integrations also need a client library, an exporter, or another prerequisite listed on that integration’s reference page.
  • Prebuilt dashboards: Tailored dashboards for that technology. You do not have to build them.
  • Alert rules: Default alert rules for common conditions. Each integration’s reference page lists the rules and what they check.