---
title: "Cloud Provider Observability overview | Grafana Labs"
description: "Unified visibility across AWS, Azure, and GCP"
---

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

## Unified visibility across AWS, Azure, and GCP

| Cloud     | Metrics                               | Logs                       |
|-----------|---------------------------------------|----------------------------|
| **AWS**   | CloudWatch Scrape, CloudWatch Streams | CloudWatch Logs, Firehose  |
| **Azure** | Azure Monitor via Alloy               | Event Hub, Azure Functions |
| **GCP**   | Cloud Monitoring via Alloy            | Pub/Sub                    |

## Choose your strategy

| Strategy                                 | How it works                                 | Best for                                                                                                  |
|------------------------------------------|----------------------------------------------|-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------|
| **Store in Grafana Cloud** ✓ recommended | Collect metrics/logs → Grafana Cloud storage | Long retention, unified alerting, and access to advanced tools like Knowledge Graph and Grafana Assistant |
| **Query directly**                       | Query cloud APIs on demand                   | Evaluating Grafana with existing data, or strict data residency requirements                              |
| **Hybrid**                               | Store critical, query the rest               | When data residency prevents storing some data in Grafana Cloud                                           |

## Questions answered

| With Cloud Provider Observability, you can answer…            |
|---------------------------------------------------------------|
| How do my AWS EC2 instances compare to Azure VMs in one view? |
| Which cloud region has the highest latency?                   |
| What were my Lambda function errors last month?               |
| How is my multi-cloud infrastructure performing overall?      |

## Problems solved

| Problem                          | Solution                               |
|----------------------------------|----------------------------------------|
| Metrics siloed in each cloud     | Unified multi-cloud visibility         |
| Limited cloud provider retention | 13 months for metrics in Grafana Cloud |
| Different query languages        | PromQL/LogQL for everything            |