In one of the latest announcements of re:Invent 2020, AWS introduced the preview of Amazon Managed Service for Grafana (AMG), a managed Grafana that automatically scales compute and database infrastructure, with automated version updates and security patching. In a related but separate announcement, AWS also introduced a preview for Amazon Managed Service for Prometheus (AMP), a Prometheus-compatible monitoring service for container infrastructure and application metrics for containers.
The combination of Prometheus and Grafana is a common monitoring stack used by DevOps teams for saving and visualizing time series data. An open source solution for running data analytics and monitor applications with the help of customizable dashboards, Grafana works as the interface for analysis and visualization while Prometheus is used for event monitoring and real-time alerting, recording metrics in a time series database.
The preview of the new Grafana service is a partnership between AWS and Grafana Labs where AWS will contribute licensing revenues to Grafana. Raj Dutt, co-founder and CEO at Grafana Labs, explains the agreement in a separate article and highlights the collaboration for Prometheus too:
We want to make sure that Grafana is available wherever and however it makes the most sense for our users. And that, ultimately, is at the heart of our partnership with AWS. We are also collaborating with AWS on its new Amazon Managed Service for Prometheus, built on the Cortex project for running Prometheus at scale. This service can complement Amazon Managed Service for Grafana. The Cortex maintainers (including its co-creator) who work at Grafana Labs bring their expertise to the collaboration, while the numerous Prometheus maintainers on our staff are continually shaping the direction both projects take. This launch, too, is a testament to the power of community and open source.
Source: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/mt/getting-started-amazon-managed-service-for-prometheus/
AMG is integrated with AWS data sources such as Amazon CloudWatch, Amazon Elasticsearch Service, Amazon Timestream, AWS IoT SiteWise, AWS X-Ray, and AMP. Upgrading to Grafana Enterprise, it is possible to consolidate data from AppDynamics, DataDog, Dynatrace, New Relic, MongoDB, Oracle Database, ServiceNow, Snowflake, Splunk, and Wavefront. Among the common use cases, the option to visualize logs of events, metrics that measure key system attributes and traces of processes, or applications that consume microservices. Matt Asay, cloud and open source executive at AWS, explains how the cloud provider and Grafana Labs are improving the product and supporting more services:
AWS and Grafana engineers have closely collaborated for years on Grafana data source plug-ins for Amazon CloudWatch, AWS X-Ray, and Amazon Timestream — each open source and used daily by thousands of customers. But this went beyond engineering collaboration (...) AWS, too, has added to Grafana in the Amazon Managed Service for Grafana, deeply integrating Grafana with native AWS capabilities such as AWS CloudTrail; AWS Single Sign-on; multi-account, multi-region access; and auto-scaling.
AWS is not the first cloud provider embracing Grafana; Oracle recently announced Grafana plugins for Oracle Cloud Infrastructure metrics and logs and Azure offers Grafana plugin for Azure Monitor and Application Insights.
While AMP is in open preview, AMG requires access to the preview and is priced per workspace, per month with different pricing for editors and viewers. The pricing structure raised some questions among users on Reddit: "For the free version it does seem a bit steep but as a current Grafana enterprise customer the pricing seems comparable and that might be the real target audience."