Grafana Learn
Sign in Sign up
Path

Learn how to navigate and analyze your AWS metrics using Grafana dashboards and exploration tools.

Estimated time: 3 min

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.