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Key takeaways

Course summary

What you learned

  1. Integrations collect and store data in Grafana Cloud with pre-built dashboards and alerts

  2. 10 most commonly deployed integrations by category:

    • OS: Linux, Windows
    • Databases: MySQL, PostgreSQL, MongoDB
    • Network: HAProxy, IIS, SNMP
    • Messaging: Kafka, Istio

  3. The key advantage over data sources:

    • Integrations = Full Grafana Cloud features (dashboards, alerts, ML, SLOs)
    • Data Sources = Visualization only

The one thing to remember:

Integrations give you the fastest path to full observability — pre-built content plus all Grafana Cloud features enabled.

Script

Let’s bring it all together. Integrations are pre-packaged monitoring solutions that collect and store data in Grafana Cloud.

Because your data lives in Grafana Cloud, you get everything the platform offers: expert-designed dashboards, managed alerting with ML anomaly detection, SLO tracking, and cross-signal correlation. This is the fundamental advantage over data source connections, which only give you visualization.

The ten integrations we covered span the most common infrastructure: Linux and Windows for hosts; MySQL, PostgreSQL, and MongoDB for databases; HAProxy and IIS for web traffic; SNMP for network devices; Kafka for streaming; and Istio for service mesh.

Start with what matches your environment and expand from there. Most teams begin with host monitoring and add integrations as needs grow.

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