Slide 3 of 5

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 and 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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