The advantages of private data source connect

Private data source connect, or PDC, is a way for you to establish a private, secured connection between a Grafana Cloud instance, or stack, and data sources secured within a private network.

The Grafana Labs PDC solution offers several advantages:

• The monitoring and supervision of the SSH tunnel are delegated to an agent running inside your private network. At any time, you can shut off the agent, which terminates the connection. PDC is entirely within your control, since you deploy and manage the agent.
• The agent running inside your private network is a horizontally scalable component to ensure fault-tolerance. You can deploy multiple agents within the same network, and Grafana Cloud load balances across them automatically.
• Traffic is encrypted all the way from your Grafana Cloud stack to the SSH client running in your private network. If the private data source supports encryption (for example, HTTPS), traffic will be encrypted end-to-end.

Additional advantages:

• You can configure compatible data sources to route requests through the SSH tunnel. Each data source is configured using the internal DNS name (for example, mysql.your.domain:3306), as if Grafana were running directly inside the private network.
• You can restrict the destinations reachable by Grafana Cloud over this tunnel using the PermitRemoteOpen SSH option.
• You can route each session transparently and securely to the correct connection without having to deal with CIDR ranges.
• Routing requests through PDC has a negligible effect on query time — only tens of milliseconds on average.

In the next milestone, you’ll select your PDC installation method.