Amazon Managed Grafana
Fully managed Grafana for dashboards over metrics, logs, and traces: workspaces, AWS and third-party data sources, sign-in with IAM Identity Center or SAML, user roles, alerts, security, per-active-user pricing, and how it compares with CloudWatch dashboards.
2 min read · Last reviewed · SAA-C03
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What it is
Amazon Managed Grafana is a fully managed data visualization service based on open-source Grafana. You use it to query, correlate, and visualize operational metrics, logs, and traces from many sources on one set of dashboards, without deploying or scaling Grafana servers yourself.
Choose it when a question mentions Grafana, or asks for dashboards that combine data from several sources, such as CloudWatch, Prometheus, X-Ray, and OpenSearch, with SSO (Single sign-on)Signing in once to reach many applications or accounts without signing in to each again. AWS IAM Identity Center provides single sign-on to AWS accounts and applications.Glossary entry for the team.
Concepts
- Workspace: a logically isolated Grafana server that AWS provisions, scales, and maintains.
- Data sources: built-in integration with Amazon CloudWatch, Amazon Managed Service for Prometheus, AWS X-Ray, Amazon OpenSearch Service, Amazon Timestream, AWS IoT SiteWise, and others, plus third-party sources. A permission provisioning feature can set up the IAM access for AWS data sources.
- Authentication: users sign in with IAM Identity Center or a SAML (Security Assertion Markup Language)An XML-based standard for passing sign-in information from an identity provider, such as Microsoft Entra ID or Okta, to a service. AWS accepts SAML 2.0 for single sign-on, directly in IAM or through IAM Identity Center.Glossary entry identity provider (or both) and are given user, editor, or administrator permissions.
- Alerts: Grafana alerting can notify teams when queries cross thresholds.
Security, resilience, performance, and cost
- Security: single sign-on, data access control, and audit reporting; workspaces access AWS data sources through IAM roles.
- Resilience and performance: AWS manages provisioning, scaling, and maintenance of the workspace.
- Cost: no upfront fees; pay per active user license per workspace.
Managed Grafana or another option?
| If the requirement is | Choose |
|---|---|
| Grafana dashboards across many data sources with SSO | Amazon Managed Grafana |
| Dashboards of AWS metrics and alarms only | CloudWatch dashboards |
| Store and query Prometheus metrics | Amazon Managed Service for Prometheus |
| Business intelligence dashboards for analysts | Amazon Quick (formerly QuickSight) |
Reverse mindmap: when the question points here
- Yes, when the question says
- Managed Grafana dashboards leads to Managed Grafana
- One dashboard over CloudWatch, Prometheus, and X-Ray leads to Managed Grafana
- Team sign-in with SSO to dashboards leads to IAM Identity Center or SAML
- Pair it
- Prometheus metrics store leads to Managed Service for Prometheus
- No, when the question says
- Simple AWS metric dashboards leads to CloudWatch dashboards
- Business analytics for analysts leads to Amazon Quick
Key takeaways
- Managed Grafana is fully managed Grafana for metrics, logs, and traces from many data sources.
- Workspaces are isolated Grafana servers that AWS runs for you.
- Users sign in with IAM Identity Center or SAML and get user, editor, or administrator permissions.
- Pricing is per active user per workspace; pair it with Managed Service for Prometheus for container monitoring.