---
title: "AWS metrics - Metric Streams | Grafana Labs"
description: "Collect AWS CloudWatch metrics using metric streams for low latency."
---

> For a curated documentation index, see [llms.txt](/llms.txt). For the complete documentation index, see [llms-full.txt](/llms-full.txt).

## How it works

[AWS Metric Streams architecture: AWS pushes metrics to Grafana Cloud via Kinesis Firehose](cp-olly-aws-metric-streams-light.svg "AWS Metric Streams architecture: AWS pushes metrics to Grafana Cloud via Kinesis Firehose")

**Recommended for AWS production**

**Complexity:** Moderate | **Infrastructure:** Firehose + IAM | **Latency:** Seconds

## Trade-offs

| Pros                         | Cons                        |
|------------------------------|-----------------------------|
| Near real-time (seconds)     | Requires AWS infrastructure |
| Better cost profile at scale | More complex initial setup  |
| No API rate limits           |                             |
| Easier long-term maintenance |                             |

## Why metric streams for production

- Lower latency for alerting (seconds vs. minutes)
- Better cost profile as you scale
- Easier maintenance (no scrape schedules to manage)
- Scales smoothly across multi-account AWS

## Documentation

View the full documentation. *Learning path coming soon!*

[AWS metric streams](https://grafana.com/docs/grafana-cloud/monitor-infrastructure/monitor-cloud-provider/aws/cloudwatch-metrics/metric-streams/)