AWS

Setting up AWS Managed Grafana in minutes to display metrics from Amazon Managed Prometheus and CloudWatch

Jeremy Chauvet

Mar 3, 2024 — 3 min read

Grafana is the most popular monitoring open source tool. Trusted by hundreds of companies across the world, Grafana is available as a managed service on AWS since August 2021.

In this article, we will configure in a minute a Grafana workspace and his applications.

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Amazon Managed Grafana requires IAM Identity Center - setup not included in this article.

Setup Grafana

In March 2024, Amazon Managed Grafana is only available in the following regions:

Service is available: ✅ | Service not yet available: ⏳

Region	City	Code	Availability
US	North Virgina	us-east-1	✅
US	Ohio	us-east-2	✅
US	North California	us-west-1	⏳
US	Oregon	us-west-2	✅
Asia P.	Hong Kong	ap-east-1	⏳
Asia P.	Mumbai	ap-south-1	⏳
Asia P.	Tokyo	ap-northeast-1	✅
Asia P.	Seoul	ap-northeast-2	✅
Asia P.	Osaka	ap-northeast-3	⏳
Asia P.	Singapore	ap-southeast-1	✅
Asia P.	Syndey	ap-southeast-2	✅
Europe	Frankfurt	eu-central-1	✅
Europe	Ireland	eu-west-1	✅
Europe	London	eu-west-2	✅
Europe	Paris	eu-west-3	⏳
Europe	Stockholm	eu-north-1	⏳
South America	Sao Paulo	sa-east-1	⏳

First, search for "Grafana" in the service list:

Create a workspace:

And configure the settings: you need to choose between two authentication access options (AWS SSO and SAML).

On the next step page, you will be able to add pre-configured data sources managed by AWS, such as Cloudwatch or Amazon Managed Service for Prometheus. On this example, both will be activated.

You have successfully configured your Grafana workspace:

Configure access

On the workspace summary, search for "authentication" tab, and configure access using the authentication method of your choice.

For the purpose of the setup, you need to be admin to configure Grafana datasource and apps.

Setup apps

Use the Grafana workspace URL to login to Grafana. This URL can be found in the summary header of your workspace.

Display the menu using the button next to "Home", and search for "AWS Data Sources" in "Apps" section:

For each AWS data source activated, you must configure it prior to use it in dashboards panels. Select a service in the dropdown list, choose a region, then validate by clicking on "Add data source":

Data source are now ready to use!

This marks the end of this article. In summary Amazon Managed Grafana is a powerful yet simple way to use a tool everyone trust.

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