Skip to main content
In this lesson we cover Grafana — the visualization and dashboarding platform used to turn raw metrics and logs into actionable, human-friendly insights. You may already be collecting metrics with services like CloudWatch or Prometheus. Grafana’s job is to query those metric stores and present the results as charts, heatmaps, tables, and interactive dashboards so your teams can quickly spot trends and problems. CloudWatch provides a basic UI for exploring metrics and logs, but many teams need richer visualization, advanced panels, templating, and dashboard sharing. Grafana fills that gap by connecting to multiple backends (for example, CloudWatch or Prometheus) and rendering data in flexible, focused dashboards.
A simple architecture diagram showing Amazon EC2, AWS Lambda, and Amazon DynamoDB sending metrics into Amazon CloudWatch. Amazon Managed Grafana then queries CloudWatch to visualize those metrics.
What Grafana does well
  • Queries many data sources in their native formats (Prometheus, CloudWatch, Elasticsearch, MySQL, and more).
  • Renders data as time-series graphs, heatmaps, tables, single-stat panels, and alerting rules.
  • Builds team- and role-specific dashboards so each audience sees the most relevant signals.
For the Solutions Architect exam, remember this distinction: data collection and storage are handled by tools like CloudWatch or Prometheus. Grafana’s role is visualization — it queries those stores and displays the results in human-readable dashboards.
A diagram showing the Amazon Managed Service for Prometheus architecture: an EC2 instance inside a VPC sends (ingests) metrics to Amazon Managed Service for Prometheus, which is queried by Amazon Managed Grafana. Below are icons labeled Collect, Monitor, and Analyze representing the workflow.
Grafana for teams and AWS
  • Team-focused dashboards: build pages for a specific application, data center, or team to surface only relevant metrics.
  • Unified observability: combine metrics, logs, and traces in a single UI by integrating Grafana with CloudWatch, tracing systems, and third-party sources.
  • Managed offering: AWS provides Amazon Managed Grafana so you don’t need to operate Grafana servers. The managed service handles scaling, patching, and availability.
Security and integration
  • Amazon Managed Grafana supports single sign-on (SSO) and integrates with identity providers (for example, AWS SSO, SAML) so users can access dashboards with corporate credentials.
  • Managed Grafana integrates with AWS observability services (CloudWatch, Amazon Managed Service for Prometheus, X-Ray, and others) for streamlined access to telemetry data.
When to use Grafana vs CloudWatch vs Prometheus Summary
  • Use CloudWatch or Prometheus to collect and store metrics.
  • Use Grafana to query these data sources and build informative, role-based dashboards.
  • Use Amazon Managed Grafana when you want a hosted Grafana with AWS-native integrations and identity support.
Links and references

Watch Video