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Section 1 · Send data fundamentals

When to send from collectors you already run

Estimated time: 2 min

Is this journey right for you?

This journey covers sending metrics and logs from collectors you already run. The Grafana Cloud OTLP endpoint (OTLP is short for OpenTelemetry Protocol) also accepts traces.

The send metrics docs describe three ways to connect data. This journey is the second one: send from an existing observability deployment.

A good fit when:

  • You already collect with Prometheus, InfluxDB, Graphite, OpenTelemetry, or a similar setup, and you want Grafana Cloud to store that data.
  • You want to keep managing that collection yourself.
  • You want to send only some of your metrics, such as a proof of concept or one team’s metrics.
  • You want to keep a copy of the same metrics in Grafana Cloud and in the system you already run.

Other ways to get data into Grafana Cloud

ApproachWhen the docs suggest itLearn more
IntegrationsYou want to get started quickly, or you want prebuilt dashboards and alerts. An integration is a package that bundles Grafana Alloy (Grafana’s distribution of the OpenTelemetry Collector), dashboards, and alerts. Some integrations do not install Alloy on the host you monitorIntroduction to integrations
Data sourcesYou want to query data where it is already stored, without storing a copy in Grafana CloudIntroduction to data sources

For AWS, Azure, and GCP, see Introduction to Cloud Provider Observability.