AWS metrics - Metric Streams

AWS Metric Streams are our recommended approach for production AWS monitoring. This completely flips the model from scrape jobs. Instead of Grafana Cloud pulling metrics from CloudWatch, AWS pushes them to you.

Here’s the architecture: you create a CloudWatch Metric Stream that selects which metrics to export. That stream delivers to a Kinesis Firehose, which batches and forwards to Grafana Cloud’s ingestion endpoint.

The result? Metrics arrive in seconds instead of minutes, which is critical for alerting. And because AWS is pushing rather than Grafana pulling, you get a better cost profile at scale and don’t worry about API rate limits.

Long-term maintenance is easier too. There’re no scheduled scrape jobs to manage.

Yes, there’s more upfront setup. You’re deploying infrastructure in your AWS account: the Metric Stream itself, a Firehose delivery stream, IAM roles to authorize everything.

But you can template this with Terraform or CloudFormation and deploy consistently across all your accounts. The investment pays off quickly in reliability, cost efficiency, and lower alerting latency.