Select PDC and test connection

The private data source connect (PDC) feature allows you to establish a secure connection between Grafana Cloud and your JSON endpoint.

If you don’t use PDC, your queries and data are transmitted over the public internet, exposing them to potential security risks.

If you are working with a public dataset such as ThingSpeak, you don’t need authentication and can skip this milestone. However, we recommend that you create a private connection whenever you connect Grafana Cloud to an internal, private data source.

In this milestone, you select an active PDC agent and test the connection to Grafana Cloud.

To select a PDC agent and test the connection, complete the following steps:

Note: For a newly created data source, the Private data source connect section might not appear at first. If you don’t see it, select another data source tab and return to Settings.

In this section, you select a running PDC agent and test the secure connection to your JSON endpoint.

In the Private data source connect field, select the name of a PDC agent.
For the test connection to be successful, you must select a PDC agent that’s running.
If you’re using the public ThingSpeak endpoint, you can skip this step.
Click Save & test.

When the test succeeds, you see a Success message that confirms the secure connection to your endpoint.

You can now build a dashboard that visualizes the JSON data.