Connect to an Amazon CloudWatch data source in Grafana Cloud

Welcome to the Grafana learning path that shows you how to connect Grafana Cloud to Amazon CloudWatch and query your AWS metrics and logs.

Amazon CloudWatch is the AWS native monitoring and observability service that collects metrics, logs, and events from your AWS resources, applications, and services. The CloudWatch data source lets you query that data directly from Grafana — no data migration required — and correlate it with other data sources in unified dashboards.

Grafana includes built-in support for the CloudWatch plugin, so there’s nothing to install. This path walks through connecting with the Grafana Assume Role authentication method, which lets Grafana Cloud access your AWS account without long-lived access keys.

Here’s what to expect

When you complete this path, you’ll be able to:

• Understand what the CloudWatch data source gives you in Grafana
• Prepare the AWS IAM permissions Grafana needs to read metrics and logs
• Add the CloudWatch data source in Grafana Cloud
• Select an authentication method and set your default AWS region
• Configure the Grafana Assume Role trust relationship in AWS
• Test the connection and query CloudWatch data in Explore

Before you begin

Before you connect to Amazon CloudWatch, ensure you have:

• A Grafana Cloud account. To create an account, refer to Grafana Cloud.
• An AWS account with CloudWatch metrics or logs to query.
• Permission to create IAM roles and policies in your AWS account (the Organization administrator role in Grafana is required to configure the data source).
• Familiarity with the AWS region your resources run in.

Troubleshooting

If you get stuck, we’ve got your back! Where appropriate, troubleshooting information is just a click away.

More to explore

We understand you might want to explore other capabilities not strictly on this path. We’ll provide you opportunities where it makes sense.