Creating multiple data sources using 1 stack in Grafana Cloud Managed Service

Grafana Cloud
1

Disclaimer: Not a programmer here.

We are using the managed service for Grafana Cloud to connect various compute engine instances in GCP to Grafana. It seems to be a single stack in Grafana cloud could only have 1 data source. Is adding a new stack is the only way to create a new data source or is there any other way?

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Hi @kalai2 - You should be able to connect as many datasources as you need within 1 stack. A few questions to make sure you’re headed down the right path:

  1. What datasource(s) are you looking to connect from GCP? (Prometheus? Loki? MySQL? etc)
  2. Or are you sending Prometheus Metrics or Logs to Grafana Cloud?

For 1: Here you can simply log into your Grafana Cloud instance (name.grafana.net) → Connections → Datasources → ‘Add New Datasource’. This will then allow you to configure as many unique datasources you need

For 2: This depends on your use case. We recommend shipping your data to your single stack. However, if you have a use case where you prefer to separate Dev/Test/Prod then it’s an option to add additional stacks (on our Pro tier) to enable this. I’ll provide more context once you’re able to follow up.

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Hey @daviddorman,

Thank you for replying.

We are sending prometheus metrics from different GCP compute instances and right now we are able to do so within 1 stack. We are wondering if it’s possible to configure our current setup for each compute instance to be a datasource instead as this will give us more flexibility.

For additional context:

  1. We are using this guide for our installation.
  2. In Grafana when we open the datasource that is currently linked to our stack, it shows that it is a “Provisioned data source. This data source was added by config and cannot be modified using the UI. Please contact your server admin to update this data source.”
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Thanks for that information. Generally speaking, this sounds like a common use case where you are looking to observe multiple instances and ship that data to Grafana Cloud. The recommended path would be to use the Linux Integration ({name}.grafana.net → Connections → Linux Integration). This will have you install the Grafana Agent on each instance you’re looking to observe and a unique label per instance will appear in the prometheus metric name.

By using this integration, you’ll see a series of out of the box dashboards right away where you can filter based on each of your instances.

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