What's an integration?

What’s an integration?

An integration is a prepackaged monitoring bundle 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, not days.
No maintenance burden: Grafana Labs maintains the dashboards and alert rules, so you don’t have to.
Broad coverage: Choose from over 100 prebuilt integrations across hosts, databases, web and proxy, messaging, and network systems.

What’s included in an integration?

Every integration bundles three things:

Grafana Alloy configuration: Preconfigured collection settings and a curated set of default metrics for your technology. Just install the collector and metrics start flowing.
Prebuilt dashboards: Expert-designed visualizations that surface the metrics that matter. No dashboard building required.
Alert rules: Recommended thresholds based on industry best practices like CPU > 90%, disk > 80%, etc. Ready to notify you when something goes wrong.

Integrations are turnkey monitoring packages: prebuilt collection, dashboards, and alerting for over 100 technologies, maintained by Grafana so you don’t have to. Instead of spending hours choosing metrics, building dashboards, and writing alerts, you get all of it in minutes.

You deploy Grafana Alloy with the integration’s configuration, and the collector brings your data into Grafana Cloud. From there, you get prebuilt dashboards and recommended alerts, so you can start monitoring in minutes instead of days.