How to install and use Grafana in AWS cloud?

March 23, 2020 / Nirav Shah

How to Install and Use Grafana on AWS Cloud

Grafana is a swissknife for running analytics & monitoring multiple metrics online. Grafana is an opensource tool that manages analytics and reports from multiple cloud sources through one simple dashboard. Grafana is an open source for metric analytics & visualization suite generally used for visualizing varied data from infrastructure and application analytics into one easy to use window. It provides a simple dashboard for all of your data and its doesn’t matter where is stored. You can get data from Graphite, Elasticsearch, Prometheus, MariaDB/MySQL, PostgreSQL and so on. Grafana can be easily extended with the help of loads of plugins for various data sources. It is extensively used by software developers to quickly query, visualize, alert, and analyze metrics of their application. It also provides the server managers to have a close eye at the crucial metrics sent by the server logs to monitor the performance, availability, and overall health of the server.

What Are the Key Features of Grafana for AWS Monitoring?

• Highly extensible by using hundreds of dashboards and plugins from the official library
• Dynamic & reusable dashboards.
• Supports multi-tenancy, set up multiple independent organizations.
• Supports notifications via Slack, PagerDuty, and more.
• Greatly supports collaboration by allowing sharing of data and dashboards across teams and so much more

The tool helps us study, analyse & monitor data over the period of time. It helps us track the user behaviour, application behaviour, frequency of errors and many more.

Methods for Installing Grafana on AWS Cloud (Multiple Options)

Now let’s see how can we install on AWS Console :-

There Two method for installing Grafana:-

1. Pre-configured AMI Available on AWS Marketplace (by Bitnami)

2. Installation on the AWS EC2 Instance

Note

When you Create an IAM role you have to create a Custom policy..

Select JSON and put this policy:

{
   "Version": "2012-10-17",
   "Statement": [
       {
           "Sid": "AllowReadingMetricsFromCloudWatch",
           "Effect": "Allow",
           "Action": [
               "cloudwatch:ListMetrics",
               "cloudwatch:GetMetricStatistics",
               "cloudwatch:GetMetricData"
           ],
           "Resource": "*"
       },
       {
           "Sid": "AllowReadingTagsInstancesRegionsFromEC2",
           "Effect": "Allow",
           "Action": [
               "ec2:DescribeTags",
               "ec2:DescribeInstances",
               "ec2:DescribeRegions"
           ],
           "Resource": "*"
       }
   ]

Also Read: Launch an AWS Ec2 instance for free