Amazon Managed Grafana
Cloud service · AWS · Updated

Amazon Managed Grafana

In short

Amazon Managed Grafana is a fully managed service by AWS that provides scalable, secure, and easily deployable visualizations for real-time analytics, operational dashboards, and monitoring across various data sources.

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6 key features of Amazon Managed Grafana

Amazon Managed Grafana offers a fully managed service with out-of-the-box integration with AWS and other data sources, built-in security, automatic scalability, and enhanced collaboration features, streamlining the process of data visualization and monitoring.

01
Fully Managed

Amazon Managed Grafana is fully managed by AWS, reducing the need for users to perform manual setup, maintenance, and scaling operations.

02
Seamless Integration

It offers seamless integration with AWS services and other data sources, allowing users to visualize metrics and logs from multiple sources in one place.

03
Secure by Design

With built-in security features such as AWS IAM Identity Center or SAML for workspace user authentication and Grafana roles and permissions for fine-grained access control, users can ensure that their data is secure and accessible only to authorized personnel.

04
Scalability

Amazon Managed Grafana automatically scales to meet the demand, ensuring that dashboards and visualizations load quickly, even as data volume grows.

05
Collaboration and Sharing

Facilitates team collaboration by allowing users to share dashboards and visualizations securely, ensuring that insights can be distributed across teams and departments easily.

06
AWS Data Source Permission Provisioning

Amazon Managed Grafana provides permission provisioning for adding supported AWS services as data sources.

Where Amazon Managed Grafana is used

Amazon Managed Grafana serves as a versatile tool for real-time performance monitoring, infrastructure health visualization, cost optimization, security compliance, and providing analytics for business intelligence.

  1. 01
    Real-time Performance Monitoring

    Use Amazon Managed Grafana to visualize and monitor the real-time performance of application workloads deployed across AWS services. This use case involves aggregating metrics, logs, and traces to diagnose and resolve issues quickly, ensuring high availability and performance.

  2. 02
    Infrastructure Health Dashboards

    Organizations can leverage Amazon Managed Grafana to create comprehensive dashboards providing instant insights into the health of their cloud infrastructure. This includes visualizations for CPU utilization, memory usage, and network activity, enabling teams to preemptively identify and troubleshoot potential issues.

  3. 03
    Cost and Usage Optimization

    With Amazon Managed Grafana, businesses can analyze their AWS cost and usage data to identify trends, uncover inefficiencies, and optimize spending. Grafana dashboards can track expenditures across different services, providing actionable insights to reduce costs while maintaining performance.

  4. 04
    Security and Compliance Monitoring

    This use case involves using Amazon Managed Grafana to consolidate security logs and metrics for the purpose of monitoring, visualizing, and analyzing security data in real time. It helps in ensuring compliance with industry regulations and internal policies by providing a clear overview of the security posture.

  5. 05
    Application Analytics and Business Intelligence

    Amazon Managed Grafana can be used to aggregate data from various sources, including RDS and DynamoDB, to provide analytics and insights into application usage, user behavior, and business KPIs. Custom dashboards can help in making data-driven decisions to drive growth and improve user experience.

How Amazon Managed Grafana is priced

Amazon Managed Grafana has a pay-as-you-go model based on active user count and data queried, with an optional Enterprise agreement for discounted rates on committed usage.

Pay-As-You-Go

User licenses are billed monthly per workspace: $9 per active Editor or Administrator and $5 per active Viewer. Each workspace incurs a minimum of one Editor license even if no users log in.

Enterprise Plugins

An Enterprise Plugins license costs an additional $45 per active user per workspace and includes access to Grafana Labs support and on-demand training.

API User and Service Account Licenses

Active API users and service accounts are billed at $9 for Administrator or Editor permissions, or $5 for Viewer permissions. If multiple API keys with different permissions share one API user license, the higher price applies.

Free Trial

A 90-day free trial covers up to five users per account; usage beyond those five users is billed at standard license rates.

Services Amazon Managed Grafana works with

Amazon CloudWatchAmazon CloudWatch

Amazon CloudWatch is a monitoring and observability service that provides data and actionable insights for AWS, hybrid, and on-premises applications and infrastructure resources.

AWS X-RayAWS X-Ray

AWS X-Ray helps developers analyze and debug production, distributed applications, such as those built using a microservices architecture.

Amazon AthenaAmazon Athena

Amazon Managed Grafana includes an Athena data source for running SQL queries and displaying their results in dashboards. You can use it to visualize operational or business data queried from Amazon S3.

Amazon AuroraAmazon Aurora

Amazon Managed Grafana can query Aurora databases through its MySQL and PostgreSQL data sources, depending on the database engine. Workspace VPC connectivity lets dashboards access databases that are not publicly reachable.

Amazon Aurora ServerlessAmazon Aurora Serverless

Amazon Managed Grafana can connect to Aurora Serverless databases through its MySQL or PostgreSQL data sources using the database endpoint. Dashboards can run SQL queries to visualize application data.

Amazon EC2Amazon EC2

Amazon Managed Grafana's CloudWatch data source can look up EC2 instance attributes and tags to populate dashboard variables. This lets users select instances by attributes such as instance ID or instance type when exploring their metrics.

Amazon Managed Service for PrometheusAmazon Managed Service for Prometheus

Amazon Managed Grafana can discover Prometheus workspaces and query their metrics using AWS-authenticated data source connections. It can also display alerts from the workspace's Alertmanager.

Amazon OpenSearch ServiceAmazon OpenSearch Service

Amazon Managed Grafana can query OpenSearch Service domains to visualize indexed logs and other data. Its OpenSearch data source supports AWS authentication, and workspace VPC connectivity provides access to private domains.

Amazon RDSAmazon RDS

Amazon Managed Grafana can query RDS for MySQL and RDS for PostgreSQL through its built-in database data sources. A workspace can connect through a VPC to visualize data from a private database instance.

Amazon RedshiftAmazon Redshift

Amazon Managed Grafana provides a Redshift data source that executes SQL through the Redshift Data API. Dashboards can visualize warehouse query results using database credentials or supported IAM-based authentication.

What is Amazon Managed Grafana

3 min read

Amazon Managed Grafana is a fully managed service that is developed and maintained by Amazon Web Services (AWS) to offer seamless, scalable, and secure Grafana deployments. Grafana, an open-source platform widely recognized for its powerful and flexible capabilities in metrics monitoring, analytics, and visualization, plays a critical role in the observability and operational intelligence space.

It integrates with a vast array of data sources, including Prometheus for metrics, Loki for logs, and Elasticsearch for both, enabling users to aggregate and visualize data to monitor their applications and infrastructure health effectively. Amazon Managed Grafana abstracts away the complexities inherent to setting up, operating, and scaling Grafana in cloud environments. It automates the provisioning of the environment, taking on the responsibility of managing the server infrastructure, setup, maintenance, updates, and security. Users control Grafana version upgrades and can validate a new version before upgrading production workspaces. 

A workspace is a logically isolated Grafana server in which you create dashboards and visualizations to analyze metrics, logs, and traces.

The default quota is five workspaces per AWS account per Region, and this quota can be increased.

One of the defining characteristics of Amazon Managed Grafana is its seamless integration with AWS services. It can easily connect with Amazon CloudWatch, AWS X-Ray, Amazon OpenSearch Service, and other AWS data sources, allowing users to visualize and analyze data across various AWS services without the need to manage data ingestion and storage. Moreover, the integration extends beyond AWS, with support for popular third-party data sources, services, and on-premises data, ensuring a comprehensive monitoring solution that can cater to diverse environments. 

Workspaces can optionally be upgraded to enable Enterprise data source plugins, including connectors for Datadog, MongoDB, Oracle Database, Salesforce, and Snowflake.

Security in Amazon Managed Grafana is robust, leveraging AWS's secure and compliant infrastructure. It integrates with AWS IAM Identity Center and identity providers supporting SAML 2.0 for workspace user authentication and authorization. This ensures that users can only access the metrics and logs they are authorized to view. Moreover, it supports single sign-on (SSO), making it convenient for teams to access Grafana dashboards without managing separate login systems. Encryption in transit and at rest further assures that data is protected, aligning with best practices and compliance requirements. 

Amazon Managed Grafana supports both API keys and service accounts for interacting with Grafana HTTP APIs. Service accounts using service account tokens replace API keys as the primary way to authenticate applications interacting with Grafana. API keys are on a deprecation path and may be fully removed in upcoming major Grafana releases.

Finally, the service is designed to scale seamlessly with the user's needs. It can dynamically adjust based on demand, ensuring that Grafana remains highly available and performant even during traffic spikes. This scalability, coupled with the managed nature of the service, allows organizations to focus on leveraging Grafana for insights rather than worrying about infrastructure management. 

In summary, Amazon Managed Grafana offers a powerful, secure, and scalable solution for deploying Grafana, combining the extensive visualization capabilities of Grafana with the ease of use and operational excellence of AWS. It significantly lowers the barrier to entry for organizations looking to deploy sophisticated monitoring and visualization solutions, empowering them to derive actionable insights from their data with minimal operational overhead.

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