---
title: "What's an integration? | Grafana Labs"
description: "Understanding Grafana integrations"
---

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

# What’s an integration?

An integration is **prepackaged monitoring** for a specific technology, such as a Linux host, MySQL database, or Kafka cluster. It deploys the Grafana Alloy collector to bring your data into Grafana Cloud, ready to use with prebuilt dashboards and alerts.

## Why use an integration?

- **Fast setup**: Connect a technology in minutes.
- **Maintained defaults**: Grafana Labs maintains the default dashboards and alert rules.
- **Broad coverage**: Choose from a large library of prebuilt integrations across hosts, databases, web and proxy, messaging, and network systems.

## What’s included in an integration?

Every integration includes three things:

- **Grafana Alloy configuration**: Preconfigured collection settings and a curated set of default metrics for your technology. Some integrations also need a client library, an exporter, or another prerequisite listed on that integration’s reference page.
- **Prebuilt dashboards**: Tailored dashboards for that technology. You do not have to build them.
- **Alert rules**: Default alert rules for common conditions. Each integration’s reference page lists the rules and what they check.