DocumentationGrafana CloudInstrument and send data

Instrument and send data to Grafana Cloud

After you’ve created a Grafana Cloud account, the next step is to connect data to your Grafana stack. You can connect to your data using one of three primary methods, depending on what service or database is producing the data and how you want to use Grafana Cloud to work with that data.

• Use integrations when you want to monitor the infrastructure of a service with pre-configured dashboards and alerts, and let Grafana manage the data. To learn more, refer to Use integrations to monitor your infrastructure.

• Use data sources when you want to query, alert on, and visualize service data that remains in your local environment. To learn more, refer to Use data sources to monitor existing databases.

• Create custom connections when you want to scale and manage existing observability deployments in Grafana Cloud. For more information, refer to Send your observability data from an existing database.

Instrument applications

Follow the application instrumentation guide to find out how to instrument your application with OpenTelemetry or Prometheus.

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If you’re using integrations, you should have automatic access to dashboards and alert rules. If you’ve used an other method to connect your data to Grafana Cloud, refer to the following topics to learn how to visualize and alert on that data:

• Metrics and visualizations
• Visualize existing observability data
• Grafana Alerting