The documentation seems to focus primarily on “Owned” grafana suites, and basically says “Connect it!”
Does anyone have either a guide or suggestions on how to connect an iotawatt to the Grafana Cloud as a datasource? specifically https://InstanceName.grafana.net/
New to this and trying to get started 
I think all of the current users are uploading to influxDB and then using that as a datasource for grafana. IoTaWatt does have a fairly decent API Query, but have never looked into connecting to grafana directly. Graph+ is our tool for direct use.
Let us know if you find it possible.
That is very interesting… a question for you (not sure if you know)
it looks like the Free influxdb has a 30day retention for data…
any chance you know if grafana Pulls (stores a copy) of influx data? or just queries it when you load a dashboard?
I have been running InfluxDB on a home server for years now, with no such ‘30 day’ limitation. Are you referring to a cloud-based free version of InfluxDB? If so, I can see why they’d have to limit retention, as someone has to pay for those cloud server resources. 
Grafana does not store any data. It just displays data from a variety of data sources, one of those being InfluxDB.
I’ve been using influx’s 2 cloud for a year now. With two units uploading my monthly bill is around $1.50. I can’t argue with that. The cloud does require that data be uploaded with https, so I run a reverse proxy as described in the docs. Can’t beat the simplicity and speed of the clod version.
I am indeed looking at the cloud-based version. I would much prefer a fewer number of VMs in the office.
(influx cloud → grafana cloud)
grafana doesnt store data
that it patently false.
Grafana does indeed “Store” a lot of data. the grafana-agent for example Uploads usage metrics from servers to grafana-cloud.
If you don’t want another VM running to provide the HTTPS proxy for Influx cloud, I have a script that I use that’ll push to both on-prem and cloud Influx. And I’ve got both PowerShell and Python versions of the script, so you can run them on pretty much anything. Let me know if you’ve interested and I’ll dump them on GitHub.
while i didnt want to do so, I ended up just setting up an ubuntu 20.04 VM with both influxdb and grafana running locally.