What is Grafana? How do I change the color of a panel set? Where can I find all public dashboards? Who made the Kessel Run in less than 12 parsecs?

AWS’s serverless technologies are popular because they provide cost effective scaling and great separation of concerns. However, observing serverless architectures like Lambda is challenging due to their transient nature and abstracted infrastructure. Unlike traditional systems with consistent hosts, serverless functions are ephemeral, often scaling rapidly and operating in isolation.

Grafana dashboards are powerful and flexible tools for observing applications and infrastructure, so it’s no surprise we get a lot of questions from the community about how to embed them into their web applications. Over the past few releases, we’ve developed a lot of options for how to do this in Grafana, but there can be confusion about how they work, and when to use each approach.

You may be ready to make the move to Grafana Cloud, but securely querying private data has been a blocker. If you wanted to query a network-secured data source like a MySQL database or an Elasticsearch cluster that is hosted in an on-premises private network or a Virtual Private Cloud (VPC), you needed to open your network to inbound queries from a range of IP addresses.

Using Grafana Cloud to manage and monitor even your most sensitive data from your AWS services just got easier. If your organization’s workloads are hosted in AWS and you are using a Grafana Cloud instance that’s also hosted in AWS, you can now use AWS PrivateLink to establish a secure connection between your virtual private cloud (VPC) network and Grafana Cloud for all your data.