---
title: "Prerequisites | Grafana Labs"
description: "What you need before starting this course"
---

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

## For hands-on practice

If you’d like to follow along with the learning path exercises and configure your pipeline to send data, you’ll need:

- A Grafana Cloud account ([sign up free](/signup/cloud/connect-account))
- A metrics or logs pipeline (Prometheus, InfluxDB, OpenTelemetry, etc.)
- Access to configure your pipeline’s remote write or export settings

**Just exploring?** You can complete the course without hands-on practice. The concepts and decision frameworks are valuable on their own.

## Recommended prior knowledge

| Topic                             | Why it helps                            |
|-----------------------------------|-----------------------------------------|
| Basic Grafana navigation          | You’ll verify data in Grafana Cloud     |
| Your current pipeline setup       | You’ll configure it to send data        |
| Understanding of your data format | Helps choose the right ingestion method |