How it works

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

You configure a subscription filter on your CloudWatch log group that sends logs to an Amazon Data Firehose stream. The stream batches the logs and delivers them to Grafana Cloud, with built-in retry and error handling. AWS handles the scaling.

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

Considerations

High-throughput streaming with automatic scaling
Automatic retry and error handling
Native CloudWatch integration
Cost-effective for high log volumes
Buffered delivery latency, typically 60-900 seconds
Limited in-flight transformation
IAM role setup required, plus Amazon Data Firehose usage cost

Documentation

View the AWS Firehose logs documentation.

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Read transcript

Audio transcript

Amazon Data Firehose handles most AWS log collection. It collects CloudWatch logs from your applications, RDS instance logs, and VPC Flow Logs with high scalability and cost efficiency.

Firehose is a managed streaming service. You configure a subscription filter on your CloudWatch log group that sends logs to Firehose.

Logs flow in, get batched automatically, and deliver to Grafana Cloud with built-in retry and error handling. You don’t manage any compute. AWS handles the scaling.

Cost matters at scale. Firehose keeps costs predictable for high log volumes, which suits production workloads.

One thing to know is latency. Firehose buffers logs before delivery, typically anywhere from 60 to 900 seconds, depending on your configuration.

That’s fine for most use cases. You’re not usually doing real-time alerting on raw log lines.

For CloudWatch logs at any scale, Firehose is straightforward to operate, cost-effective, and scales seamlessly with growing log volumes.

How it works

CloudWatch logs collected with Firehose

Considerations

Documentation

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