Amazon Managed Grafana Cheat Sheet

Last updated on June 23, 2023

Bookmarks

Components
Security
Pricing

What is Amazon Managed Grafana?

A data visualization service for querying, correlating, and visualizing operational metrics, logs, and traces from multiple sources.
Create dashboards and visualizations to analyze metrics, logs, and traces without having to build, package, or deploy Grafana servers.
All logical Grafana server deployment, setup, scaling, and maintenance are handled by AWS.
Integrated with the following AWS data sources:
- Amazon CloudWatch
- Amazon OpenSearch Service
- AWS X-Ray
- Amazon Timestream
- Amazon Managed Service for Prometheus

Amazon Managed Grafana Components

Workspaces
- A logically isolated Grafana server.
- User authentication method for workspaces is through:
  - SAML 2.0
  - AWS IAM Identity Center
- Each Region can have up to five workspaces.
- Supports Grafana HTTP APIs
- You can create permissions and policies to manage the workspace’s data sources and notification channels.
- When you delete a workspace, the following items are also removed:
  - Dashboards
  - Data source configuration
  - Alerts
  - Snapshots
A user may only have one of three roles: Admin, Editor, or Viewer.
Teams
- Allows you to grant permissions to a group of users.
- Using team sync, you can automatically synchronize team membership between Grafana workspace and authorization provider.
A user can be associated with the following permission:
- Grafana admin
- Membership in a team
- Specific folder or dashboard
- Data source
Data sources
- You can combine data from various data sources into a single dashboard.
- TestDB – a built-in data source to generate random walk data for testing and experiments.
- Mixed – allow you to query multiple data sources in the same panel.
- Dashboard – useful for a result set from another panel in the same dashboard.
- Supports built-in or Grafana Enterprise data sources.
Panel
- A visual representation of one or more queries.
- Each panel contains a query editor that can be used to extract a visualization to display on the panel.
  - Recorded queries enable you to take a snapshot of a data point on a set interval.
- Transformations allow you to rename fields, join separate time series together, and perform math across queries.
- A field represents a single time series or table column.
  - Field options – allow you to change the way data is displayed in your visualizations, and changes are applied to all fields.
  - Field overrides – apply only to specific fields.
- Create reusable panels using library panels.
Dashboard
- Consists of one or more panels and is arranged into one or more rows.
- Annotations are used to display event data across multiple panels.
- To organize and group your dashboards, use folders.
- A playlist is a collection of dashboards that are displayed in a specific order.
- A dashboard snapshot allows you to quickly share an interactive dashboard publicly.
Explore removes dashboard and panel options so that you can concentrate on performing queries to view your data.
Links lets you create shortcuts to the dashboard, panel, and data.
Alert rules and notification channel helps you identify problems in your system moments after they occur

Amazon Managed Grafana Security

Centrally manage data source configuration and permission settings for multiple AWS accounts using AWS Organization
You can configure organizational units to make their AWS data sources visible in the primary account.
Uses CloudFormation StackSets to automatically create IAM roles for connecting to data sources.
You need to create an API key for authorization in order to use Grafana APIs in the Amazon Managed Grafana workspace.

Amazon Managed Grafana Pricing

You are charged based on the active user license per workspace.
You are charged per active editor or administrator user per workspace in the Grafana Editor license.
You are charged per active user per workspace in the Grafana Viewer license.
You are charged per active API user in the Grafana API user license.