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What's the Difference Between Amazon CloudWatch and Amazon Managed Grafana?

Compare Amazon CloudWatch and Amazon Managed Grafana side by side — features, pricing, and ideal use cases to help you choose the right product.

Compare side-by-side

Comparisons
Amazon CloudWatch
Amazon Managed Grafana
Category

Management & Governance, Observability / monitoring

Management & Governance, Observability

Description

Observability tool to collect metrics, logs, and events across AWS, multicloud, and hybrid environments

Fully managed Grafana service for interactive data visualizations and dashboards.

Best for
  • Infrastructure monitoring
  • Application monitoring
  • Log analytics
  • Alerting
  • Operational dashboards
  • IoT monitoring
  • Application observability
  • Business metrics
Key features
  • Metrics
  • Logs
  • Alarms
  • Dashboards
  • ServiceLens
  • Managed Grafana
  • Multiple data sources
  • SSO integration
  • Alerting
  • Plugin support
Pricing model

Pay per metric, dashboard, alarm, log data ingested

Pay per active editor/viewer user per month

Free tier

Yes

No

Expert take

“CloudWatch is the default observability backbone for AWS. Every service emits metrics automatically; you just need to decide what to alarm on. Logs Insights lets you query log groups with a SQL-like syntax. For Prometheus-compatible metrics or Grafana dashboards, use the managed services alongside it.”
— Didier Durand, re:Post Top Contributor [profile]

“Managed Grafana gives you fully managed Grafana workspaces with built-in IAM authentication and data source plugins for CloudWatch, Prometheus, X-Ray, and Timestream.”
— Didier Durand, re:Post Top Contributor [profile]

Product page

When to use Amazon CloudWatch or Amazon Managed Grafana

Use Amazon CloudWatch when:

  • Infrastructure monitoring
  • Application monitoring
  • Log analytics
  • Alerting

Learn more about Amazon CloudWatch »

Use Amazon Managed Grafana when:

  • Operational dashboards
  • IoT monitoring
  • Application observability
  • Business metrics

Learn more about Amazon Managed Grafana »

AWS product comparisons

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