How Grafana Cloud Ingests Your Data | Data Sources, Alloy & OTel Explained

Learn the two main ways to get data into Grafana Cloud. In this video, we break down how Grafana Cloud connects to over 150 external data sources (like Salesforce, Postgres, and CloudWatch) where your data stays in place, and how you can send raw telemetry into Grafana’s fully managed databases for logs, metrics, traces, and profiles.

You’ll also see why Grafana Alloy, an open source data collector is the easiest way to forward telemetry to Grafana Cloud. Alloy combines the power of OpenTelemetry and Prometheus with simple deployment and optional fleet management for centralized control. Prefer another option? You can still use the OpenTelemetry collector or any OTLP-capable client to send data directly to Grafana Cloud’s OTLP endpoint.

Chapters:

00:00 – Introduction & Recap

00:33 – Breaking down Grafana Cloud

02:55 - Closing

LINKS/RESOURCES
Learn more about Grafaa Cloud: https://www.grafana.com/cloud
Get started with the Grafana Cloud forever-free tier: https://grafana.com/g/cloud
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Reach out in our community forums: https://gra.fan/communityyf

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