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Section 2 · Cloud metrics

Collect AWS CloudWatch metrics using scrape jobs.

Estimated time: 1 min

How it works

AWS scrape jobs architecture: Grafana Cloud pulls metrics from CloudWatch API

Complexity: Simple | Infrastructure: None | Latency: Minutes

Configure an AWS integration in the Grafana Cloud UI and provide IAM credentials, typically a read-only user or role. Choose which regions and CloudWatch namespaces to scrape, such as EC2, RDS, or Lambda. 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 with automatic service discovery
  • Metrics in Prometheus format for PromQL
  • 1-5 minute latency
  • CloudWatch API cost and rate limits at scale
  • IAM setup for cross-account access

When to use

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

For ongoing production monitoring: See metric streams.

Path

Configure this approach step by step.

AWS metrics scrape jobs