---
title: "AWS logs - Firehose | Grafana Labs"
description: "Collect CloudWatch logs using Amazon Data Firehose (recommended for most use cases)."
---

> 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 logs Firehose architecture: CloudWatch Logs to Kinesis Firehose to Grafana Cloud Loki](cp-olly-aws-logs-firehose-light.svg "AWS logs Firehose architecture: CloudWatch Logs to Kinesis Firehose to Grafana Cloud Loki")

**Complexity:** Moderate | **Infrastructure:** Managed | **Latency:** Buffered (60-900s)

## CloudWatch logs collected with Firehose

| Log type              | Source                 | Key insights               |
|-----------------------|------------------------|----------------------------|
| **CloudWatch Logs**   | Applications, services | Application events, errors |
| **RDS Instance Logs** | Database instances     | Query logs, slow queries   |
| **VPC Flow Logs**     | Network interfaces     | Network traffic, security  |

## Trade-offs

| Pros                             | Cons                   |
|----------------------------------|------------------------|
| ~3x cheaper than Lambda at scale | Buffering adds latency |
| High-throughput streaming        | Firehose costs         |
| Managed (automatic scaling)      | Limited transformation |
| Automatic retry/error handling   | IAM role setup         |
| Native CloudWatch integration    |                        |

## Documentation

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

[AWS Firehose logs](https://grafana.com/docs/grafana-cloud/monitor-infrastructure/monitor-cloud-provider/aws/logs/firehose-logs/)