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.
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. When you configure Alloy, it scrapes metrics from your hosts or services and remote-writes them to your Grafana Cloud endpoint.
To explore an option for sending data, complete the following steps:
If you have not signed in to your Grafana Cloud environment, do so now.
Open the main menu on the left, and click Connections.
Click the Add new connection tile.
Click the Custom data icon to filter the connection options.
Click the tile labeled Hosted Prometheus metrics.
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.
Review the two installation options:
- 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.
At this point in your path, you can explore the following topics: