AWS metrics: scrape jobs

Complexity: Simple | Infrastructure: None | Latency: 5 min default

Create an IAM role that Grafana Cloud assumes; you don’t hand over access keys. Choose which regions and CloudWatch namespaces to scrape, such as EC2, RDS, or Lambda. Each listed service includes a default set of metrics. A custom namespace is not in that list: you add the namespace and enter its metrics. Grafana Cloud queries the CloudWatch API on a schedule, pulls the metrics in, and converts them to Prometheus format so you can query them with PromQL.

Considerations

• Configured entirely in the Grafana Cloud UI, with no AWS infrastructure to deploy
• 60+ AWS services supported
• Metrics in Prometheus format for PromQL
• Default scrape interval of 5 minutes (configurable)
• CloudWatch API cost and rate limits at scale
• IAM setup for cross-account access
• Resources must be tagged; scrape jobs export only tagged resources
• A scrape job has a resource limit per service across regions. Split the job by region, or ask Grafana support to raise the limit
• Metrics for a deleted resource can keep appearing for about three hours. Remove its tags before you delete it

When to use

• Quick start and evaluation
• Proof-of-concept setups
• Small environments with moderate metric volume

For ongoing production monitoring, use metric streams instead.

Set it up

Open this path in your Grafana Cloud stack for a fully interactive experience, or read through it to understand the process first. You’ll need access to your AWS account with permissions to create IAM roles.