---
title: "AWS observability | Grafana Cloud documentation"
description: "AWS observability enables you to monitor the health and performance of your AWS infrastructure and large scale applications in Grafana Cloud."
---

# AWS observability

AWS Observability for Grafana Cloud provides you with a centralized place to access, query, alert on, and interact with your infrastructure and large scale applications. Start work instead of managing a backend, and configure securely. AWS Observability provides you with access to a fast, [scalable backend](/products/cloud/) that you don’t have to manage. Instead of running your own exporter to pull cloud data to a local observability system, you can use the Grafana cloud-native solution to keep your data in the cloud, with minimal setup overhead.

The benefits of using AWS Observability include:

- Centralized access and management: Access and manage your metrics and logs in Grafana Cloud, and work with your observability data in a centralized, consistent way. All data is stored in a single backend along with the rest of your observability data. You can write single queries that span all data, including infrastructure and application data.
- No credential exchange: Configure with no exchange of credentials required. AWS Observability follows [AWS best practices](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/IAM/latest/UserGuide/id_roles_common-scenarios_third-party.html) for granting third parties access. Grafana Cloud gains access using [AWS account delegation](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/IAM/latest/UserGuide/tutorial_cross-account-with-roles.html). Or you can configure AWS to send your data directly to Grafana Cloud.

## Options out of the box

Out of the box, AWS Observability offers the following options.

### Metrics

Connect and pull metrics from Amazon CloudWatch into Grafana Cloud using [CloudWatch metric scrape](/docs/grafana-cloud/monitor-infrastructure/monitor-cloud-provider/aws/cloudwatch-metrics/config-cw-metric-scrape/), without deploying or installing any local agents or configurations, or push metrics with [CloudWatch metric streams](/docs/grafana-cloud/monitor-infrastructure/monitor-cloud-provider/aws/cloudwatch-metrics/config-cw-metric-streams/) using Amazon Data Firehose, providing real-time insights and scalability while simplifying configuration and reducing manual effort.

Use the [preconfigured dashboards](/docs/grafana-cloud/monitor-infrastructure/monitor-cloud-provider/aws/cloudwatch-metrics/metric-dashboards/) to view and analyze your metrics.

### Logs

Use [Logs with Lambda](/docs/grafana-cloud/monitor-infrastructure/monitor-cloud-provider/aws/logs/cloudwatch-logs/) to connect and send logs from multiple AWS services to Grafana Cloud by deploying a Lambda-compatible agent for logs into your AWS infrastructure.

Send [Application Load Balancer access logs](/docs/grafana-cloud/monitor-infrastructure/monitor-cloud-provider/aws/logs/cloudwatch-logs/config-alb-access-logs-lambda/) to Grafana Cloud with a Lambda function.

Use [Logs with Firehose](/docs/grafana-cloud/monitor-infrastructure/monitor-cloud-provider/aws/logs/firehose-logs/) for growing log volumes or large-scale logs. Logs with Firehose uses Amazon Data Firehose which is more scalable and almost three times cheaper.

You can [monitor AWS logs](/docs/grafana-cloud/monitor-infrastructure/monitor-cloud-provider/aws/logs/) by log groups.