Amazon Managed Grafana
A fully managed Grafana service that integrates over 30 data sources including CloudWatch, Prometheus, and Timestream to build operational dashboards
Overview
Amazon Managed Grafana is a fully managed visualization and monitoring service built on open-source Grafana. It eliminates the need for server provisioning and version upgrades, and comes with built-in authentication integration via IAM Identity Center (formerly SSO) or SAML 2.0, private connectivity to VPC data sources, and workspace-level multi-tenant isolation. You can leverage Grafana's plugin ecosystem as-is and connect to over 30 data sources including CloudWatch, Amazon Managed Service for Prometheus, Timestream, X-Ray, Athena, and Redshift.
Workspace Design and Data Source Connectivity
A Managed Grafana workspace corresponds to an independent Grafana instance. Separating workspaces by team, environment (production/development), or project keeps access control and dashboard management organized. Data source connections can be automated through the AWS data source configuration feature, allowing you to add CloudWatch or Prometheus data sources with a single click. IAM role-based authentication eliminates the need to manage access keys for each data source. To connect to VPC-hosted data sources (RDS, OpenSearch, self-managed Prometheus servers, etc.), configure a VPC endpoint connection. Cross-account data sources are also supported, enabling you to aggregate CloudWatch metrics from multiple accounts within an Organization onto a single dashboard. Grafana's alerting feature can detect threshold breaches and send notifications to SNS, PagerDuty, or Slack. Workspace pricing is $9 USD per active user per month for Editors and $5 USD for Viewers, providing a scalable per-user billing model (as of August 2026).
Prometheus Metrics Visualization Pipeline
The combination of Managed Grafana and Amazon Managed Service for Prometheus (AMP) is the standard monitoring stack for Kubernetes environments. A Prometheus agent on an EKS cluster (AWS Distro for OpenTelemetry or Prometheus server remote write) sends metrics to AMP, and Managed Grafana draws dashboards using AMP as a data source. By leveraging Grafana's template variables, you can build interactive dashboards that dynamically switch between clusters, namespaces, and Pods. PromQL (Prometheus Query Language) enables flexible queries to express CPU usage percentiles, memory growth trends, and request rate anomaly detection. Grafana dashboards can be exported and imported as JSON, so you can manage dashboard definitions as code with Terraform or CloudFormation and maintain consistent monitoring configurations across environments. Importing community-published dashboard templates (Kubernetes cluster overview, Node Exporter, NGINX Ingress, etc.) saves you the effort of building dashboards from scratch.
CloudWatch Integration and Operational Dashboard Best Practices
Whether to use CloudWatch dashboards or Managed Grafana depends on your operations team's needs. CloudWatch dashboards are self-contained within the AWS Console and provide basic metric visualization at no additional cost. Managed Grafana's decisive advantage, however, is its ability to unify multiple data sources on a single dashboard. You can display CloudWatch metrics, Prometheus container metrics, Timestream IoT data, and Athena business metrics side by side on one dashboard, giving you a holistic view from infrastructure to business. A recommended approach for effective dashboard design in practice is a three-tier structure. The first tier is an executive summary (SLA achievement rate, error rate, key KPIs). The second tier provides team-level service details (latency distribution, throughput, resource utilization). The third tier offers troubleshooting-level detailed metrics (individual instances, log correlation). Use Grafana's folder and team features to organize dashboards, and manage viewing permissions for each tier through role-based access control.
| Aspect | CloudWatch dashboards | Amazon Managed Grafana |
|---|---|---|
| What it is good at | Everything stays inside the AWS console, and basic metric visualisation costs nothing extra | Bringing several data sources together into a single dashboard |
| What it connects to | Metrics collected by CloudWatch | CloudWatch, Amazon Managed Service for Prometheus, Timestream, X-Ray, Athena and more, with the Grafana plugin ecosystem available as-is |
| What can sit on one screen | Metrics from AWS resources | CloudWatch metrics, Prometheus container metrics, Timestream IoT data and Athena business metrics side by side, giving a view from infrastructure up to the business |
| How to choose | When basic metric visualisation is enough | When you need one view across data sources |
- Layer 1: an executive summarySLA attainment, error rate and the headline KPIs on one screen, so the state of the system reads in seconds.
- Layer 2: per-service detail for the teamLatency distribution, throughput and resource utilisation laid out service by service, to narrow down what is slow.
- Layer 3: detailed metrics for troubleshootingDown to individual instances and log correlation, used to pin the cause down.
- Organising the layers and their permissionsGrafana folders and teams keep the dashboards tidy, and role-based access control decides who may view each layer.
References (Official AWS Resources)
The primary sources for this page are the official AWS website and documentation. Check the official pages below for the latest specifications and pricing.
- Amazon Managed Service for Prometheus official page
- Amazon CloudWatch official page
- Amazon Timestream official page
- AWS Documentation (official)
If this page and the official documentation disagree, treat the official documentation as authoritative.