---
title: "Start monitoring databases | Grafana Labs"
description: "What you'll learn in the Monitoring databases journey"
---

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

# Welcome

Grafana Cloud gives you two ways to monitor your databases: Database Observability and database integrations.

If you run MySQL or PostgreSQL and want to understand what’s happening inside a query, Database Observability gives you that visibility. If you want metrics, dashboards, and alerts across a broader set of databases, database integrations have you covered.

## Two monitoring approaches

- **Database Observability:** query-level visibility for MySQL and PostgreSQL, so you can see how tracked queries perform, not just aggregate database metrics
- **Database integrations:** database-level metrics, prebuilt dashboards, and alerting rules across MongoDB, Redis, Memcached, Cassandra, Oracle, and the SQL databases

## What this journey covers

- **Database Observability:** what it shows, how it works, and how to set it up for MySQL or PostgreSQL
- **Database integrations:** what they provide and how to set them up for MongoDB, Redis, Memcached, Cassandra, MySQL, PostgreSQL, and Oracle

## Supported databases

- **Database Observability:** MySQL and PostgreSQL, both self-managed and on managed services (Amazon RDS, Aurora, Google Cloud SQL, and Azure Database)
- **Database integrations:** MongoDB, Redis, Memcached, Cassandra, MySQL, PostgreSQL, and Oracle