How to Stream AWS CloudWatch Metrics into Grafana Cloud (10× Cheaper + Near Real-Time)
Unlock faster, cheaper, and more reliable AWS observability with CloudWatch Metric Streams in Grafana Cloud.
In this video, Tristan from Grafana Labs gives a full walkthrough of our new AWS Metric Streaming integration, showing how to stream CloudWatch metrics directly into Grafana Cloud using Amazon Data Firehose and Terraform.
You’ll learn:
- Why Metric Streams can deliver 10× cost savings vs scrape-based ingestion
- How streaming provides near real-time metric delivery
- How info metrics enrich AWS resource data automatically
- How to set up Metric Streams with Terraform
- How to trace and diagnose a real failure using Lambda, RDS, SQS, and logs
Timestamps:
00:00 — Introduction & What Metric Streams Solve
01:11 — Why Scraping Wastes Money: Cost & API Efficiency
02:11 — Near Real-Time Metrics: Streaming vs. Scraping Performance
03:02 — Architecture Overview: CloudWatch → Firehose → Grafana Cloud
04:13 — How Grafana Enriches AWS Metrics with Metadata
05:00 — Info Metrics Explained (YACE + AWS Resource Tags)
06:08 — How Info Metrics Feed Dashboards, Alerts & Knowledge Graph
07:13 — Getting Started: Metric Stream Setup in Grafana Cloud
08:06 — Terraform Configuration Walkthrough
08:46 — Viewing AWS Metric Streams in Grafana Cloud
09:52 — Demo Environment: Lambda, SQS, RDS Workflow
10:46 — Everything Healthy: Baseline Logs & Metrics
11:38 — Breaking the System: Introducing an RDS Auth Failure
12:40 — Alerts Trigger & Errors Captured in Logs
13:42 — Fixing the Failure & System Recovery in Grafana Cloud
14:30 — Final Overview & What Metric Streams Enable
Links/resources:
Learn more about streaming AWS CloudWatch Metrics into Grafana Cloud: https://grafana.com/blog/2025/09/03/aws-metric-ingestion-for-less-save-money-and-get-near-real-time-stream-into-grafana-cloud/
Read more about AWS Observability in Grafana Cloud: https://grafana.com/solutions/cloud-monitoring-aws/
Get started with the Grafana Cloud forever-free tier: https://grafana.com/g/cloud
Have a question? Ask Grot, your AI helper: https://grafana.com/grot/
Reach out in our community forums: https://gra.fan/communityyf
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