AWS Announces General Availability of Amazon Managed Grafana

By: Amazon Web Services, Inc. via Business Wire

August 31, 2021 at 23:30 PM EDT

Fully managed data visualization service gives customers a scalable, secure, and highly available way to visualize operational metrics, logs, and traces across multiple AWS and third-party data sources

NTT DATA Services, Area52, and Tech Mahindra among the customers and partners using Amazon Managed Grafana

Today, Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS), an Amazon.com, Inc. company (NASDAQ: AMZN), announced the general availability of Amazon Managed Grafana, a fully managed data visualization service that enables customers to instantly query, correlate, and visualize operational metrics, logs, and traces, as well as Internet of Things (IoT) data. Developed in collaboration with Grafana Labs, Amazon Managed Grafana manages the provisioning, setup, scaling, and maintenance of Grafana so customers can easily create dashboards to view operational data from multiple data sources without having to worry about the underlying Grafana infrastructure. Additionally, built-in security and compliance features like single sign-on, fine-grained access control, and audit reporting mean that customers no longer need to invest time and resources setting up their own infrastructure to manage and audit access to Grafana dashboards. Amazon Managed Grafana also integrates with AWS data sources that collect operational data (e.g. Amazon CloudWatch, Amazon Elasticsearch Service, Amazon Managed Service for Prometheus, etc.) and provides plug-ins for popular third-party data sources (e.g. Graphite, InfluxDB, MySQL, etc.), so customers can easily connect their data sources to Amazon Managed Grafana to get up and running quickly. There are no upfront fees or commitments to use Amazon Managed Grafana, and customers pay only based on monthly active-user licenses. To get started, visit aws.amazon.com/grafana/.

Many businesses are moving to the cloud, adopting new application architectures (e.g. microservices, containers, serverless, etc.), and using IoT devices for greater agility and to enable new capabilities, but these customers also find it difficult to understand the interdependencies of these systems and applications. Observability (how well developers can understand what happens in a system by tracking operational data) is essential to the design of these systems to help companies make sense of operational data (e.g. metrics, logs, and traces), optimize application health and performance, and quickly debug issues. Today, customers use a combination of tools to collect and store different types of operational data for better observability, but the variety of tools used to track data across teams makes it difficult to get a consolidated view of an application’s health and performance. Grafana is a popular open-source observability tool developed by Grafana Labs that is used to create dashboards that visualize operational metrics across multiple data sources so developers can have a more intuitive understanding of their application. Many AWS customers choose to self-host Grafana servers, but setting up, integrating, scaling, and maintaining Grafana in production is time consuming and complex. Once deployed, customers still need to separately authenticate credentials for every data source and AWS account, which takes additional time and engineering resources. Customers also need a secure way to manage access to Grafana dashboards throughout their organization, while maintaining their corporate security and compliance requirements. However, customers may not have an easy and consistent method to manage user access or track how information is being used for auditing purposes. As more teams gain access to Grafana, customers also need to invest additional time provisioning, configuring, and managing new servers, ensuring high availability for users, and staying up to date with new versions and security patches—all of which increases operational overhead and takes resources away from building applications that deliver value to customers.

Amazon Managed Grafana is a fully managed data visualization service that is scalable, secure, and highly available—allowing customers to create Grafana dashboards in AWS for their operational and IoT data, without needing to manage the provisioning, setup, scaling, and maintenance of Grafana servers. Amazon Managed Grafana also allows customers to easily discover resources in their AWS accounts and automatically provision AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) policies to access their data, which helps customers build interactive dashboards that track the right operational metrics. Additionally, Amazon Managed Grafana makes it easier for customers to meet their security and compliance requirements, allowing them to authenticate users with AWS Single Sign-On (AWS SSO) and Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML) 2.0, and to use AWS CloudTrail to track changes made to an Amazon Managed Grafana deployment for compliance and audit tracking. Because Amazon Managed Grafana is a fully managed service, customers can scale from tens to thousands of users while maintaining high availability. AWS also manages all updates and security patches, so customers can focus on improving application performance. Through the collaboration with Grafana Labs, customers can seamlessly enable additional enterprise data-source plugins by activating Grafana Enterprise. This gives customers access to a range of third-party plugins (e.g. AppDynamics, Datadog, Dynatrace, New Relic, Oracle Database, ServiceNow, Splunk, Wavefront, Snowflake, MongoDB, etc.) that make it easier to take existing data from third-party applications and integrate them directly into Amazon Managed Grafana for even greater visibility across a customer’s entire application.

“AWS customers love the highly interactive dashboards they are able to create using Grafana but don’t want to deal with the added operational complexity of managing their own Grafana servers,” said Nandini Ramani, VP, Monitoring and Observability, AWS. “By working with Grafana Labs, we can give AWS customers a fully managed data visualization service for operational and IoT data across multiple sources that is scalable, secure, and highly available. Now, customers can spend less time managing their Grafana deployments and more time focused on building high-value applications and delivering a better experience to end users.”

“We are excited to collaborate with AWS to bring Grafana to even more users,” said Raj Dutt, CEO and co-founder, Grafana Labs. “We believe in giving our users choice in where and how they run Grafana. Together with AWS, we’re making it simpler for AWS customers to get started, so they can query, visualize, alert on, and understand any data they want. Along with dozens of included data source plugins, users can also easily enable Grafana Enterprise to visualize data from sources including Datadog, MongoDB, Splunk, Dynatrace, Snowflake, and many more, all in the same interface."

Amazon Managed Grafana is available today in US East (Ohio), US East (N. Virginia), US West (Oregon), Asia Pacific (Seoul), Asia Pacific (Singapore), Asia Pacific (Sydney), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), Europe (Frankfurt), Europe (Ireland), and Europe (London).

NTT DATA Services, a division of NTT DATA Corporation, helps clients plan, assess, develop, and deliver AWS solutions that transform their businesses. “Grafana is a powerful observability tool made even stronger with Amazon Managed Grafana. As a managed service that connects across AWS data sources, our teams use Amazon Managed Grafana because it allows them to focus their resources on troubleshooting operational issues and improving application health, not infrastructure management,” said Emily Lewis-Pinnell, VP and practice leader for Cloud Services, NTT DATA Services. “And with connectivity to AWS container services and AWS monitoring services, we are able to effortlessly monitor container health for our applications from a single dashboard.”

Area52, a technology company focused on material handling and food processing innovation, is a leader in advanced automation technologies and data analytics that helps its customers create more yield and perform rapid root cause analysis to find ways to optimize production pipelines. “We needed a solution to graph process data from industrial IoT devices and various supporting systems for customers operating in seafood processing and other industrial markets,” said Tim Fogarty, founder, Area52. “We chose Amazon Managed Grafana because it allowed us to graph and visualize data for our customers without complex IT integrations. Now, we’re able to more easily track key metrics across our customers’ operations and create proactive alarm notifications if capacity and utilization targets are missed, so we can help our customers course correct to meet their production goals.”

Tech Mahindra is an AWS Advanced Consulting Partner that specializes in digital transformation, consulting, and business re-engineering solutions with over 117,600 professionals working across 90 countries that have helped over 840 companies transform how they operate. “We believe that our customers stand to gain significant benefits with the introduction of Amazon Managed Grafana because of the out-of-the-box resource discovery experience and ability to easily onboard their AWS accounts across multiple regions,” said Ramprasad Nagaraja, VP of cloud native engineering/digital supply chain, Tech Mahindra. “We see a natural transition for a lot of our customers who are self-hosting Grafana based on early discussions because Amazon Managed Grafana removes the burden of self-hosting and managing Grafana infrastructure themselves.”

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