---
title: "Explore options for sending data | Grafana Labs"
description: "Learn about the observability databases included in your Grafana Cloud stack and how to send data using Grafana Alloy or Prometheus remote_write."
---

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

# Explore options for sending data

Every Grafana Cloud stack includes four fully managed open source databases. You don’t deploy or manage any of these. They come preconfigured as part of your stack.

Expand table

| Database  | What it stores                  | Query language |
|-----------|---------------------------------|----------------|
| Mimir     | Metrics (Prometheus-compatible) | PromQL         |
| Loki      | Logs                            | LogQL          |
| Tempo     | Traces                          | TraceQL        |
| Pyroscope | Continuous profiles             | –              |

You can send data to these databases in several ways, including the OTLP endpoint, Prometheus `remote_write`, or a telemetry collector. The Grafana Alloy collector is built on OpenTelemetry with native Prometheus pipelines.

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. Type **Hosted Prometheus** in the search box to filter the results.
5. Click the tile labeled **Hosted Prometheus metrics**.
6. This opens a set of steps for sending metrics to your Grafana Cloud Prometheus endpoint. The alternative is connecting an external Prometheus data source, which you’ll explore in the next milestone.
7. Review the two installation options: **Standard** (for regular hosts) and **Kubernetes** (for cluster workloads).

<!--THE END-->

- **Standard** installs Alloy as a system service on a Linux, macOS, or Windows host. It scrapes node metrics such as CPU, memory, and disk.
- **Kubernetes** deploys Alloy through a Helm chart. It uses Kubernetes service discovery to auto-discover pods and services in your cluster.

In the next milestone, you explore options to connect external data sources to Grafana Cloud.

* * *

### More to explore (optional)

At this point in your path, you can explore the following topics:

- [Connect or send data to Grafana Cloud](/docs/grafana-cloud/get-started/connect-send/)
- [Instrument and send data to Grafana Cloud](/docs/grafana-cloud/send-data/)