---
title: "Grafana Cloud setup guides | OpenTelemetry documentation"
description: "Grafana Cloud setup guides Grafana Cloud provides two sets of pre-configured guides to help you set up and configure OpenTelemetry components for Grafana Cloud, including OpenTelemetry instrumentation, an OpenTelemetry Collector distribution, and cloud applications like Application Observability and Drilldown Apps."
---

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

[Documentation](/docs/)![breadcrumb arrow](/static/assets/img/icons/grafana-icon-breadcrumb-arrow-gray.svg) [OpenTelemetry](/docs/opentelemetry/)![breadcrumb arrow](/static/assets/img/icons/grafana-icon-breadcrumb-arrow-gray.svg) Grafana Cloud setup guides

## Grafana Cloud setup guides

Grafana Cloud provides two sets of pre-configured guides to help you set up and configure OpenTelemetry components for Grafana Cloud, including OpenTelemetry instrumentation, an OpenTelemetry Collector distribution, and cloud applications like Application Observability and Drilldown Apps.

### OpenTelemetry setup guide

Get started quickly with OpenTelemetry and Grafana Cloud using the OpenTelemetry setup guide. This guide helps you instrument applications, assemble data pipelines, ingest OTLP data, and gain application insights.

To access the OpenTelemetry setup guide, follow these steps:

1. [Sign In](/auth/sign-in/) to the **Grafana Cloud Portal**.
2. From your organization **Overview**, select or click **Launch** to open a Grafana Cloud stack.
3. With a stack selected, click **Launch** from the **Grafana** tile to launch Grafana Cloud.
4. From the left navigation, click or expand **Home**.
5. With the Home screen selected or expanded, click **Setup guide**.
6. From the setup guide screen, click **OpenTelemetry**.

The guide offers options for **Quickstart** and **Production** setups.

**Quickstart**:

The Quickstart guide configures instrumentation to send OTLP data directly to the Grafana Cloud OTLP endpoint, without setting up a data pipeline with an OpenTelemetry Collector.

This setup is ideal for getting started quickly, as you don’t need to configure or manage an OpenTelemetry Collector.

While you can use this architecture in production, it is not as robust or scalable as Collector-based setups. For production use of Application Observability, you must send specific host information from a Collector for billing. For more information on Application Observability host-hours pricing, refer to the [Application Observability documentation](/docs/grafana-cloud/monitor-applications/application-observability/pricing/).

**Production**:

The Production guide sets up everything you need to use OpenTelemetry in production with all supported features of Grafana Cloud, including Application Observability.

This setup is ideal for robust and scalable production data pipelines. For more information on production data pipelines, refer to our [OpenTelemetry Collector documentation](../collector/).

 *Grafana Cloud setup guide for OpenTelemetry*

### Integration connection tiles

If you are familiar with Grafana Cloud, you can use the Grafana Cloud integration connection tiles to set up specific parts of your OpenTelemetry stack, including instrumentation and data pipelines.

Integration connection tiles are available to set up the following OpenTelemetry components:

- Grafana auto-instrumentation agent for **Java** (JVM) and Grafana Alloy
- Grafana instrumentation SDK for **.NET** and Grafana Alloy
- Grafana **Beyla** eBPF auto-instrumentation and Grafana Alloy
- **OpenTelemetry (OTLP)** with Grafana Alloy, for an application already instrumented with OpenTelemetry
- The upstream **OpenTelemetry Collector** published by the OpenTelemetry Community, for an application already instrumented with OpenTelemetry

To use a Grafana Cloud connection tile to set up OpenTelemetry components, follow these steps:

1. [Sign In](/auth/sign-in/) to the **Grafana Cloud Portal**.
2. From your organization **Overview**, select or click **Launch** to open a Grafana Cloud stack.
3. With a stack selected, click **Launch** from the **Grafana** tile to launch Grafana Cloud.
4. With Grafana Cloud launched, click **Connections**, or expand, then click **Add new connection**.
5. Search for “OpenTelemetry” and press enter to filter the connection options.
6. Select the desired OpenTelemetry connection tile and follow the instructions.

 *Grafana Cloud connection tiles for OpenTelemetry*