Explore external data source connections

Grafana’s core philosophy is “bring your own data”. This means you don’t have to move data into a proprietary store. Instead, it queries data where it already lives.

You can connect Grafana Cloud to externally hosted data sources. Then you can visualize and query data that stays in its original location.

To explore options for connecting to an external data source, complete the following steps:

1. If you have not signed in to your Grafana Cloud environment, do so now.

2. Open the main menu on the left, and click Connections.

3. Click the Add new connection tile.

4. Click the Data source icon to filter the connection options.

5. Click the Prometheus data source tile.

   This option allows you to connect to an external Prometheus database and query it in place without migrating data.

6. Click Add new data source.

   You can use these settings to configure the connection to your external Prometheus server. After that, you can create dashboards and queries for your data.

7. Notice the tabs at the top lead to additional settings and information.

In the next milestone, you explore the core platform components included in every Grafana Cloud stack, from visualization and alerting to incident response and performance testing.