---
title: "Grafana Cloud capabilities | Grafana Labs"
description: "Understanding the three ways Grafana Cloud works with your data"
---

> For a curated documentation index, see [llms.txt](/llms.txt). For the complete documentation index, see [llms-full.txt](/llms-full.txt).

## Three data approaches

**Three ways Grafana Cloud works with your data**

| Capability                          | What it means                                            | When to use                                                     |
|-------------------------------------|----------------------------------------------------------|-----------------------------------------------------------------|
| **Collect and store (recommended)** | Grafana Alloy or integrations gather and store your data | You want pre-built dashboards, alerts, and a supported pipeline |
| **Send from external collectors**   | Your collectors send data to Grafana Cloud               | You have existing Prometheus, InfluxDB, Graphite, etc.          |
| **Connect to data sources**         | Grafana queries external systems directly                | Your data must stay where it is                                 |

## Focus of this course

This course focuses on sending data from external collectors to Grafana Cloud’s storage backends.

| Telemetry type | Grafana Cloud backend |
|----------------|-----------------------|
| **Metrics**    | Mimir                 |
| **Logs**       | Loki                  |