---
title: "Explore your AWS service data | Grafana Labs"
description: "Learn how to navigate and analyze your AWS metrics using Grafana dashboards and exploration tools."
---

> For a curated documentation index, see [llms.txt](/llms.txt). For the complete documentation index, see [llms-full.txt](/llms-full.txt).

# Explore your AWS service data

In this milestone, you’ll navigate and analyze the AWS metrics collected by Cloud provider. Cloud provider offers pre-built dashboards optimized for AWS services, along with powerful exploration tools to investigate performance patterns and identify potential issues.

Preconfigured dashboards for each service you’re monitoring appear automatically after you configure a scrape job, providing immediate insights into resource utilization, performance trends, and operational health. Preconfigured alerts require a one-time installation.

To install the preconfigured alerts, complete the following steps:

1. In Grafana Cloud, open the navigation menu and select **Observability > Cloud provider > AWS**, then click the **Configuration** tab.
2. Scroll down to the **Alerts Installation** section.
3. Click **Install** to install the preconfigured alert rules for your AWS services. If the alerts are already installed, skip this step.

You installed the preconfigured alerts for your AWS services.

Now open a service dashboard to explore your AWS metrics.

Click the **Services** tab.

Use the **Service** or **Source** filters to find the service you want to see, then click its name in the **Service** column. Select **Services with firing alerts** to show only services that have alerts firing.

For example, select **AWS EC2** to view EC2 instance metrics. If there are multiple instances, select the instance ID for the instance you want to see. If a service name isn’t a link, there’s no preconfigured dashboard for that service.

Explore the dashboard panels to understand your AWS resource performance. For instance, if you select a specific EC2 instance, you can explore the following panels:

- Review **CPU Utilization** panels to identify high-load instances.
- Examine **Network** charts to understand data transfer patterns.
- Check **Disk Ops** metrics to spot storage bottlenecks.
- Monitor **Instance Status** to verify resource health.

Use dashboard controls to customize your view:

- Select a time range using the time picker in the upper right. For example, select **Last 24 hours** to view recent performance.
- Apply variable filters to focus on specific instances or regions. For example, select **us-east-1** from the **Region** dropdown.

To open the links for a service’s custom dashboards, Metrics Drilldown, or Explore, click **Explore** for that service on the **Services** tab. Explore opens the metrics in Grafana’s query interface for detailed analysis.

### Insights from AWS data

Dashboards provide the following operational insights:

- **Resource utilization patterns**: Identify peak usage times and plan capacity accordingly.
- **Performance bottlenecks**: Spot consistently high CPU, memory, or I/O utilization that may require optimization.
- **Cost optimization opportunities**: Find under-utilized resources that could be downsized or terminated.
- **Availability monitoring**: Track instance health and service uptime across your AWS environment.

In your final milestone, you’ll celebrate completing this AWS monitoring learning path and discover additional resources for expanding your observability capabilities.