Two options for monitoring cloud provider data
Both options let you visualize, correlate, and alert on your cloud data. The difference is where your data lives and how much comes prebuilt.
Cloud Provider Observability
The Grafana Cloud product for monitoring AWS, Azure, and GCP. It sends your metrics and logs to Grafana Cloud Metrics and Grafana Cloud Logs, so:
- Prebuilt dashboards and alerts: your cloud services get dashboards and alerts out of the box, so you don’t build everything yourself.
- Keep metrics longer: store metrics past the fixed retention window your provider caps them at.
- One query language: query metrics and logs with PromQL and LogQL.
- Added cost: storing data in Grafana Cloud adds ingestion and storage cost.
A data source
A CloudWatch, Azure Monitor, or Cloud Monitoring data source connects to your data where it lives, so:
- No extra cost: your data isn’t copied or stored again, so you skip the extra ingestion and storage cost.
- Provider retention: metric retention is capped at what your provider allows, and you can’t extend it.
- Your own dashboards and alerts: build them without sending the data to Grafana Cloud.
- Occasional access: a good fit for data you query occasionally or would rather not duplicate.
The practical distinction is cost.
- Cloud Provider Observability adds ingestion and storage cost for a prebuilt, curated, and retained experience.
- A data source adds no extra ingestion or storage cost because it queries your data where it lives.
You don’t have to choose one approach for everything. For example, store your production data in Grafana Cloud, and query dev or ad-hoc data in place with a data source.