Slide 6 of 8

Is this journey right for you?

Is this journey right for you?

Good fit for external collectors:

  • You already run Prometheus, InfluxDB, Graphite, or Telegraf
  • Your applications already emit OpenTelemetry
  • You want managed, scalable long-term storage
  • You don’t want to change your existing collection setup
  • You’re comfortable building your own dashboards

Not a fit? Return to the previous slide to compare all Level 1 approaches and find the right journey for your situation.

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Before investing time in this journey, let’s make sure sending from external collectors is the right approach for your situation.

This approach works well when you already have collection infrastructure in place. Maybe you’re running Prometheus and want to add long-term storage without managing it yourself. Maybe you have Telegraf collecting InfluxDB metrics and want a scalable backend. Maybe your applications already emit OpenTelemetry and you need somewhere to send it.

In all these cases, the collection problem is solved. You just need storage. That’s exactly what this journey covers: sending your data to Grafana Cloud’s Mimir for metrics and Loki for logs, without requiring you to change how you collect.

But this approach isn’t for everyone. If you don’t have collection infrastructure yet, you’d be better served by Grafana Alloy or integrations. That’s Grafana’s recommended approach. If you want pre-built dashboards and alerts out of the box, integrations are the faster path. And if your data needs to stay in your own systems for compliance reasons, connecting through data sources might be the better fit.

Take a look at the criteria on this slide. If you see yourself in the “good fit” checklist below, you’re in the right place. If not, return to the previous slide to explore other approaches.

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