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AWS metrics scrape jobs

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.

Learning path

Configure this approach step by step.

AWS metrics scrape jobs

Script

CloudWatch scrape jobs are the fastest way to get AWS metrics into Grafana Cloud. Perfect for evaluation or quick proof-of-concept setups.

Here’s how it works. You go into the Grafana Cloud UI, set up an AWS integration, and provide IAM credentials, typically a read-only user or role. You select which regions to monitor and which CloudWatch namespaces to scrape: maybe EC2, RDS, Lambda, or all of them.

Grafana Cloud then queries the CloudWatch API on a schedule and pulls those metrics in. They get converted to Prometheus format automatically, so you can query them with PromQL just like any other metric in Grafana.

The beauty is simplicity: nothing to deploy in your AWS account, no infrastructure to manage.

A few things to know: CloudWatch metrics are typically 1-5 minutes old by the time they’re available through the API, and at scale, CloudWatch API usage adds cost and can hit rate limits.

Scrape jobs are great for getting started quickly and validating your setup. For ongoing production monitoring, metric streams are the other AWS option, which we cover next.

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